Can't move files to the trash

I had the same problem and found out that the trash had the wrong owner. So I deleted the trash folder and made a new one.

Steps:

  1. cd ~/.local/share
  2. ls -ld Trash
  3. Now you have to look if it has the right owner.
  4. If the owner is root - delete the folder with: sudo rm -r Trash
  5. mkdir -m 700 Trash

Hope I could help and that it solved your problem, because it did for me.


As mentioned by kr4utz your problem is that Trash is owned by root.

A better way of changing the ownership without deleting the Trash folder would be to use the chown command from a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo chown -R "$USER" ~/.local/share/Trash

That will change the owner from root to yourself without deleting your Trash folder.


That's what worked for me, if the files that refuse to delete are on a partition which is not formatted as ext*:

Open /etc/fstab in any editor as root (e.g. using sudo nano /etc/fstab).

There add in the line of the partition you have problems the option uid=1000 (if your user ID is 1000, else change it)

Example:

/dev/sdb2   /media/scambio      vfat    rw,utf8,umask=0,uid=1000    0     0

and reboot

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