Nautilus shows files in Trash, can't be located on cli

Question

When browsing to trash:/// in Nautilus, I see a long list of files and directories that I recognize and remember placing in the trash. However, attempting to delete them from Nautilus either results in a Preparing message indefinitely, or an error message Error while deleting. You do not have sufficient permissions to delete the file "_____".

I've already emptied ~/.local/share/Trash/files as my regular user, and that directory does not exist as the root user.

I've downloaded the trash tool from the AUR to confirm my findings: running trash -l or trash -e as my regular user and root both confirm that the trash can is empty.

I can clearly see that it is not empty though. I'm able to browse through the directories using nautilus and open these files.

How can I locate these files in order to permanently delete them?

Answer 1

In my home directory (using KDE Plasma 5.5.x Konsole) I did

micha@linux-micha: ~
$ find | grep -i trash | head
./.local/share/Trash
./.local/share/Trash/info
./.local/share/Trash/files
./.local/share/dolphin/view_properties/trash
./.local/share/dolphin/view_properties/trash/.directory
./.local/share/local-mail/trash
./.local/share/local-mail/trash/cur
./.local/share/local-mail/trash/new
./.local/share/local-mail/trash/tmp
./.config/trashrc

So, what's .config/trashrc showing in your case Empty=true or Empty=false? Then, what's inside your .local/share/Trash/info directory? How much do things match up?

Let me know. -- Regards, Micha

Answer 2

This problem was actually being caused by having a .Trash-1000 folder on the external drive itself, with all the contents I was seeing in Nautilus within it.

In order to delete these files, I had to remount that drive as writable:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /partition/identifier /mount/point

After this point, I was able to rm -rf .Trash-1000/ on the drive, and the files were no longer visible as part of the Trash within Nautilus.