What happens if you Trash the Trash?

Question

I was just wondering what would happen if I went and moved the Trash located here:

/home/neo/.local/share/Trash

To my Trash? I mean if I go to that folder and right-click on the contents and tell it to move it to the Trash.

What would happen as it would be trying to move itself inside itself?
Is there another Trash it would move it into?
And if so, what if I also Trashed that one?

Nope, I dont think you can trash the trash.. If you do, it will end up in the recycle bin :D — Martin Yeboah, Jun 29 '15 at 13:06
@ByteCommander: Moving one object inside of itself, while still having its outside remain outside itself, is impossible (at least in the dimension), so I didn't want to give it a go! :D — , Jun 29 '15 at 13:18

score 17 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

A Trash folder is first created when a user deletes a file. Within that folder are three directories:

files, where the deleted files are stored until the trash is emptied;
info, which stores information on where the files once were and when they were deleted;
expunged, to which files are briefly moved when the trash is emptied (but may contain some owned by other users from directories you deleted).

So whenever you delete a trash indeed you are calling recursively to create a new dir for the newly trashed files.

Also note that Trash exists for every user including the root account plus sometimes you could face some dirs names such as Trash-0 , Trash-1. Read my answers here and here

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 01 '15 at 11:01

4

You can trash files inside the trash (files inside /home/USERNAME/.local/share/Trash/files/). They will just disappear for a second and then come back to the same Trash folder.

When I tried to trash the Trash folder itself (or its subdirectory "files"), I got an error by Nemo file manager that it got an illegal argument. So this seems not to work (at least not with Nemo).

edited Jul 01 '15 at 11:01

Fabby

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answered Jun 29 '15 at 13:11

Byte Commander

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What happens if you Trash the Trash?

2 Answers2