Error deleting file: Unable to find or create wastebasket directory (Ubuntu 15.04)

Question

When I try and move something to the trash like so:

gvfs-trash filename

I get the error

Error deleting file: Unable to find or create wastebasket directory

Deleting files with Nautilus comes up with a similar error. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

The solution was simple, in my case running the command

ls -ld ~/.local/share/Trash/

Gave the output:

drwx------ 4 root root 4096 Jun 13 20:19 /home/user/.local/share/Trash/

For some reason unknown to me, the trash directory was owned by root, which is not what we want. So I ran:

sudo chown -R user:user ~/.local/share/Trash/

which solved the problem.

Also, the permissions may be incorrect, so run

sudo chmod -R 700 ~/.local/share/Trash/