Autotrash is a small python script to automatically remove (permanently delete) trashed files. It relies on the FreeDesktop.org Trash files for it's deletion information. It should work for most modern desktops, including KDE and GNOME.

It scans the ~/.local/share/Trash/info directory and reads the .trashinfo files to determine their deletion date. Files older then 30 days or files matching a particular regular expression are then purged, including their trash information file.

Installation

There are mulitple ways to install the software. Either using your Linux distribution package manager (if a package is available) or using the Python package directly.

Using a distribution package is preferred as it will also ensure that autotrash is updated during your regular updates, however not all distributions have autotrash available as a package, so you may need to use python directly anyway.

• Using the a package manager:
  • On Fedora, using pipx:

    sudo dnf install pipx
    pipx install autotrash
    

  • On Ubuntu and Debian, using pipx:

    sudo apt-get install pipx
    pipx install autotrash
    

  • On ArchLinux, there is an AUR package available

Finally you could try using pip directly if pipx is not available.

Configuration

You need to run autotrash to have it inspect your trash and start deleting old files. You can always run it manually, but most of the time you want to have it run scheduled in the background.

Automatic setup with systemd

Run autotrash --install to create a systemd service which runs daily with the provided arguments. For example

autotrash -d 30 --install

will run /usr/bin/autotrash -d 30 every day.

After installing this installation, the service can also be manually started with systemctl --user start autotrash.

The timer can be enabled and disabled using systemctl --user enable autotrash.timer and systemctl --user disable autotrash.timer respectively.

The service is installed to ~/.config/systemd/user so like the cron approach, root access is not required and multiple users have their own independent services.

Manual cron setup

To run autotrash daily using cron, add the following crontab entry:

@daily /usr/bin/autotrash -d 30

You can also make autotrash process all user trash directories (not just in your home directory) by adding this crontab entry:

@daily /usr/bin/autotrash -td 30

Or more frequently, but to keep disk IO down, only when there is less then 3GB of free space:

@hourly /usr/bin/autotrash --max-free 3072 -d 30

To configure this, run "crontab -e" and add one of these lines in the editor, then save and close the file.

System startup setup

If you do not know how to work with crontab, you could add it to the startup programs in GNOME using the menu: System -> Preferences -> Sessions

Add the program with the "+ Add" button.

This will make sure that your trash is cleaned up every time you log in.

~/.gnomerc

You can create a script thats run at login to Gnome: ~/.gnomerc. One advantage to this method is ability to have different rules for various trash folders. For example:

#!/bin/bash
# Empty homedir trash
autotrash --days 30 --trash-path=~/.local/share/Trash
# Empty trash for non-home folders:
autotrash --days 10 --trash-path=/dpool/vcmain/.Trash-`id -u`
autotrash --days 15 --trash-path=/dpool/vccorp/.Trash-`id -u`

General information

Homepage: https://github.com/bneijt/autotrash

Autotrash is now in the stable repo for Fedora 20 and is going to be synced out on the mirrors also for Fedora 21. Epel7 package is still in the testing repo but should go stable within few days.

You can install the package on Fedora right now with:

yum install autotrash

Development

The autotrash command is created as a script, using poetry you can run the current implementation using:

poetry run autotrash

Or by using the shell:

poetry shell
autotrash --help

All pull requests and master builds are tested using github actions and require pre-commit to succeed.