Emptying the trash can lead to have files still on disk in expunged

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 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

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Hi,

I've not been able to reproduce this issue. It may have been a problem at some previous stage or to do with some unusual permissions on the files in question.

I will report back if I find it having happened again.

I can confirm that I get the same behaviour. The files on the "expunged" folder have some problems with permissions.

I had to open the folder as administrator to delete it.

Today I emptied the Trash but the files were "deleted" too fast and no disk activity was noticed, so I started investigating and I found all the Trash contents inside the folder ~/.local/share/Trash/expunged.

There was no problem with the permissions of the files as I have been able to remove the whole expunged folder with a "rm .local/share/Trash/expunged/ -Rv" without a single warning executed as the same user logged in the desktop.

For now I have not been able to reproduce the problem.

could you try if that's still an issue in karmic or lucid?

How to reproduce:

jimmy@jimmy:~/tmp$ mkdir test
jimmy@jimmy:~/tmp$ mkdir test/root
jimmy@jimmy:~/tmp$ touch test/root/file
jimmy@jimmy:~/tmp$ sudo chown root:root test/root/ test/root/file

Then delete ~/tmp/test in nautilus and empty the Trash. Now the Trash can seems to be empty, but the folder has been silently moved to:

jimmy@jimmy:~/.local/share/Trash/expunged$ ls
3010044318
jimmy@jimmy:~/.local/share/Trash/expunged$ ls -al 3010044318/root/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2010-05-20 21:42 .
drwx------ 3 jimmy jimmy 4096 2010-05-20 21:42 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2010-05-20 21:42 file

It's all here.

My version information:

Linux jimmy 2.6.34-2-generic #9-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 13 23:46:20 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu maverick (development branch)
Release: 10.10
Codename: maverick

nautilus:
  Installed: 1:2.30.1-0ubuntu1

It's still here with 10.04

I have experienced the same issues in Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10.

I though that maybe the directory "Expunged" was a folder that stored big files, since I saw that in one of the user's Expunged folder included video files.

So, what can we do here?

1) Inform the user that their files might be moved to ~/Trash/expunged?
2) Change the trash behavior, so that if it is a big file it will get deleted without moving it to another directory?
3) Move all files to the normal Trash directory?

But, first we need to know what kind of files and in what condition does the files get moved to "Expunged"

Related discussion at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1490072

I've just found in .local/share/Trash/expunged/ the contents of builds of some programs I had to compile to install.

8 months since bug was confirmed. Any news on it?

By the way, where ccan i find the rationale / specification on this "expunged" folder? Is it for big files, other-users files, both, none, something else?

Last but not least: shouldnt these files be deleted on reboot?

This happened to me not on my main drive but on a USB thumb drive I use for backup, formatted with FAT32. The backup program kept telling me the drive was full, so I suspected if the files were not actually deleted, so I searched for a bit and found 5GB of files in "/media/DriveLabel/.Trash-1000/expunged".

I confirm this behavior with Thunar too.

I confirm the issue with 11.10, GNOME/Nautilus 3.2.1.

As far as I understand (unfortunately, I can't find any documentation on this) files that are deleted from the trash are first moved to "expunged" (because moving files is fast), and then are slowly deleted from "expunged" (slowly because deleting a lot of files takes time and doing it too fast could slow down the whole computer).

This means that having files in "expunged" is not necessarily a problem, as long as these files get deleted over time. If there are files in "expunged" that do not vanish over time, the output from the following command could probably help the maintainers in figuring this bug out:

LANG=C ls -l ~/.local/share/Trash/expunged

What happens is that when a directory hierarchy is "deleted" in nautilus (or any other application that uses the method explained by Martin in comment 16), it gets moved to the $trash/files directory, and then when the trash gets emptied, that hierarchy is moved to the $trash/expunged directory, after which it should be deleted. Unfortunately, deleting all those files is not always possible when somewhere down the tree there are files or directories with permissions that don't allow them to be deleted by the desktop user, and then those files remain there forever, without any warning for the user...

THe bug is stll here in 2019, on 18.04.1!

I had loads of files in .local/share/Trash/expunged.

Removing them, they vanished, (rapidly), but the disc space occupied has not been released. 256GB on this machine, and it has run out of space. Backups of home/user are taking up 192GB.

Reported on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/853

Same behaviour on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS with nemo 5.2.4-1 ...
The files seem to be moved there if you delete a directory of yours with files from other users in it from the trash.

Proposal for behaviour changes:
1. Not create and use the "expunged" folder at all and just fail to delete other users' files from your own trash.
2. Continue to use the "expunged" folder but warn the user when and why and which files are being moved there (and maybe even continuing to show them in "trash:///").