How to disable creation of .Trash-1000 folder?

Have a look at this article.

According to the article, Ubuntu will create such folders when a file is deleted from a USB drive. Presumably this would allow a file to be restored if you accidentally deleted it.

It contains the following solution:

Don't use the delete button only (Otherwise the .Trash-1000 folder will be created)

Press the key combination shift+delete together to delete then Ubuntu won't create a .Trash-1000 folder. (Note: If you delete files and folders this way they are gone forever!)

As alternative you can also use the command line's rm command which will also delete the file directly.


I have found an interesting workaround that works on a per device basis, tested on Xubuntu 18.10 with USB devices and EncFS mounts.

It's very simple, remove the desired .Trash-$(id -u) directory (id -u is most commonly 1000), and create a file instead with the same name:

rm -rf /path/to/.Trash-1000
touch /path/to/.Trash-1000

What happens now when you remove a file, at least with Thunar, is that instead of moving the files to the Trash, a dialog appears warning you the files will be destroyed (which is awesome too, since you don't want them destroyed by accident).


I too am one of those who have been bugged by this problem for a number of years ... unsatisfied with the existing proposals, I've recently taken the time to investigate a solution myself.

Starting with the premise that I want the Trash to be gone system-wide, I've found that -- for the time being -- the only real solution is to create a custom-compiled version of libgio (» GIO) which is modified to call g_file_delete() every time an application calls g_file_trash().

For all technology savvy users interested in this solution: I've just recently posted a step-by-step guide on GitHub:

Globally disable GNOME's Trash in Debian-based distributions