Do not remove trash icon from desktop

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Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by bigpup »

Trash icon on the Puppy desktop is not a normal icon.
It is what is called a Rox App.
Rox file manager does not have a builtin trash, so the desktop trash is Puppies version of trash.
It has to be on the desktop for you to use it.

Trash Rox-App Help Page
Background

If you delete something with ROX-filer (or various other linux filers) it is permanently deleted, NOT sent to the trash. (If you have deleted something just now, you may be able to recover it - look at the bottom of this page)

In 2005 Dan Van Wormer wrote the "Trash" Rox-App for Puppy Linux with help from GuestToo, to provide a counterpart to the Windows "Recycle Bin". It was subsequently updated by disciple to fix bugs and add various features.

How to send something to the trash

To send something to the Trash, drag it onto the Trash roxapp from a filer window or the pinboard. You can also add the Trash to Rox-filer's "Open with" or "Send to" list.

You will get a prompt if you send a symbolic link to the Trash. This is just to let you know that you are not sending the original item to the Trash.

Looking in the trash

Each trashed item is stored in a roxapp inside /$HOME/.Trash, which also contains information about the item such as the deletion date and the original path, and has a unique suffix so you can delete multiple items with the same name.

Clicking on the Trash roxapp will open the /$HOME/.Trash directory, and will update the Trash icon if the Trash is empty but has a full icon. Right-clicking on the roxapp and selecting "Look in the Trash" will also open the Trash.

Right-clicking on the Trash roxapp and selecting "View Summary" will show you a summary of what is in the trash.

Dealing with trashed items

When the Trash is open you can click on a file to see information about it. The information window has buttons for further actions:

Press "Cancel" if you don't want to do anything with the item.
Press "Show" to show the item in Rox.
Pressing "Open" is the same as clicking the deleted item in rox, so will open a deleted folder in rox, open a deleted file in the default application, or run a deleted program.
Pressing "Restore" will restore the item to its original location. If there is now something else there with the same name, it will be trashed before the item is restored.
Pressing "Delete" will delete the item from the trash.

You can also right-click an item in the trash to access these options directly.

Emptying the trash

To empty the trash right-click on the roxapp and select "Empty the Trash". Emptying the Trash will display all the files and directories in the trash and ask for confirmation. Unless it is disabled, you can instead choose to "Quickly Empty the Trash", which will not display the contents of the Trash or ask for confirmation. You can enable this feature in AppInfo.xml, inside the Trash roxapp.
Limitations
Unfortunately the "View Summary" feature will not display items trashed by older versions of the Trash than the one in Puppy 4.1
The "View Summary" feature currently doesn't display any leading spaces in the "Item" and "Name" fields - this is a gtkdialog issue, and will occur in programs like Pfind as well.
At present everything is trashed into your $HOME folder - there are not separate Trash directories on each partition. This means you probably do not want to trash large files from elsewhere, particularly if you run Puppy from CD or a frugal install, in which case it would rapidly fill up your save file.
There are no checks for disk space - either for space in $HOME when you trash an item, or for space in other places when you restore a trashed item.
If you are using a very old version of Rox that does not support SOAP, when you "Trash" an item that has a link to it on the Desktop the pinboard must be restarted to update the desktop icons. You will notice a "flicker" as this happens. Such Rox versions will also not restore a desktop shortcut when you restore an item.

didn't understand the trash - how can I recover my deleted files?

MAKE SURE you don't write anything else to the disc they were on, or you may overwrite them. Then check out Photorec from the Testdisc package - it is good at recovering a lot of things, although it was particularly designed to recover photos from camera memory cards.

Note:
If you want to do some tweaking of the trash.
Read the other posts.

Last edited by bigpup on Mon Dec 28, 2020 3:41 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by mikewalsh »

Just as a side note, it's perfectly possible to move the /root/.Trash directory to an external partition.....or into /mnt/home.....followed by sym-linking it back into /root again.

This will allow you to use the Trash for larger items, if necessary, because Trash is now NOT inside your save-file. It will only be limited by the size of the partition it is on.

Mike. ;)

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by taersh »

mikewalsh wrote: Sun Dec 27, 2020 8:42 pm

Just as a side note, it's perfectly possible to move the /root/.Trash directory to an external partition.....or into /mnt/home.....followed by sym-linking it back into /root again.

This will allow you to use the Trash for larger items, if necessary, because Trash is now NOT inside your save-file. It will only be limited by the size of the partition it is on.

Mike. ;)

True!

But, the partition needs to be an EXT partition, as RoxApps don't work on FAT and/or NTFS partitions!

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by mikewalsh »

taersh wrote: Sun Dec 27, 2020 9:01 pm
mikewalsh wrote: Sun Dec 27, 2020 8:42 pm

Just as a side note, it's perfectly possible to move the /root/.Trash directory to an external partition.....or into /mnt/home.....followed by sym-linking it back into /root again.

This will allow you to use the Trash for larger items, if necessary, because Trash is now NOT inside your save-file. It will only be limited by the size of the partition it is on.

Mike. ;)

True!

But, the partition needs to be an EXT partition, as RoxApps don't work on FAT and/or NTFS partitions!

Indeed! My bad.

I'm so used to only using Ext3 partitions - everywhere! - that I tend to forget many people use other file formats. And the two you mentioned are, of course, FAR more common.

Mike. ;)

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by williams2 »

The trash dir $HOME/.Trash, is not inside the Trash RoxApp (Rox Filer Application Directory.)

The Trash RoxApp is still in /usr/local/apps/, symlinking $HOME/.Trash does not change that.

Symlinking $HOME/.Trash to a fat32 or ntfs partition might change the permissions and/or ownerships of some of the trashed files. All of the files in fat32 or ntfs file system will have the default file permissions and ownerships that were set when the file system was mounted.

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by taersh »

williams2 wrote: Sun Dec 27, 2020 11:40 pm

The trash dir $HOME/.Trash, is not inside the Trash RoxApp (Rox Filer Application Directory.)

The Trash RoxApp is still in /usr/local/apps/, symlinking $HOME/.Trash does not change that.

Symlinking $HOME/.Trash to a fat32 or ntfs partition might change the permissions and/or ownerships of some of the trashed files. All of the files in fat32 or ntfs file system will have the default file permissions and ownerships that were set when the file system was mounted.

Hehe, that's of course true!

BUT!!!

All files/directories moved to the Trash are stored as RoxApps inside the Trash, which then has an AppRun script, an AppInfo.xml file plus a Files directory that contains the deleted content. So, besides changing permissions it might cause different other problems. ;)

To make sure to be on the safe side it should be an EXT partition.

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by mikewalsh »

@taersh :-

Hm! I confess, I wasn't aware our Trash set-up was quite so complex... That being the case, I definitely concur; usage of an EXT2/3/4 format for any externally-mounted/symlinked .Trash directory would be doubly essential.

Good 'catch'..!

Mike. ;)

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by bigpup »

Hey! Stop all this trash talk :lol:
Thanks to all for this added information!

I added a note to the first post, to look at your posts, if you want to do some tweaking of the trash.

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by amethyst »

Is it necessary for trash to be such a "complicated" application? It seems to me that a normal folder using the delete and move commands (with the correct file attribute options) should suffice......

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Re: Do not remove trash icon from desktop

Post by taersh »

amethyst wrote: Mon Dec 28, 2020 10:59 am

Is it necessary for trash to be such a "complicated" application? It seems to me that a normal folder using the delete and move commands (with the correct file attribute options) should suffice......

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 704f6df252

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