AutoTrash: automatically purge your GNOME trash

Autotrash is a simple Python script which will purge files from your trash based on their age or the amount of free space left on the device. Using autotrash -d 30 will delete files which have been in the trash for more then 30 days. It uses the FreeDesktop.org Trash Info files included in the new GNOME system to find the correct files and the dates they where deleted.

Features:

  • Remove files that are older then a given number of days (see the -d option)
  • Purge older files to ensure a specific amount of disk space is free (see the --min-free option)
  • Check for remaining disk space, and only delete if you are running out (see the --max-free option)
  • Delete regex matching files first (see --delete-first option)

You can download the newest releases from the github project page or simply install it by running pip install autotrash.

Read more at the github project page.

See also

There is a project already packaged inside the Ubuntu archive which can achieve the same results called trash-cli. This package also promotes aliasing rm, I personally have opted to alias del with gvfs-trash.

License

All code is available under the GNU General Public License version 3+.