mjhjmtu

I found myself always holding Shift when I delete a file with Thunar (the XFCE file manager).

When I was using Windows I was always disabling "recycle bin" immediately after installation. I've looked for similar option in Thunar settings but had no luck finding it.

Do you happen to know a way?

According to the Xfce FAQ, you cannot disable the Trash.

They provide three suggestions, two of which which are also mentioned in the comments above:

1. Use Shift + del to bypass the trash bin and immediately delete something for real.




2. use cron to clean the trash every now and then.




3. or create custom action for permanent delete(like in gnome) with action: rm %f then in context menu you'll have button “permanent delete”

Personally, I use the a cron job that runs every 24 hours that calls trash-empty. You can simply call the command by itself, or give an option(in days) to remove files that have been in the trash longer than that specified number of days.

If you haven't used the concept of "Trash" since Windows 3.1, like me, you could use:

chmod 0 /home/username/.local/share/Trash/files

While this throws an error when you just use DEL, at least that error reminds you to press Shift+DEL.

I found this thread while looking for the solution of the same problem as OP. Later I found there is a simpler workaround. Pressing DEL will behave as real delete when you disable gvfs-trash command, e.g. by creating no-op command somewhere on PATH:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/true /usr/local/bin/gvfs-trash

Then you can also hide the trashcan from desktop and from left pane in Thunar using GUI configuration and everything will look like it never existed.

I don't like using a wastebasket, and I don't understand why they usually aren't optional with Linux DE's/file managers.

Anyway whatever, here's a stupid but functional workaround with whatever DE. You'll need inotifywait, which is in the inotify-tools package on Arch and Debian:

#/bin/bash

# Once at the start for good measure
rm -rf .local/share/Trash/files/*

while [ true ]
do
 inotifywait ~/.local/share/Trash/files

 # Don't get stuck in a CPU-melting loop if something goes wrong
 if [ $? -ne 0 ]
 then
 exit $?
 fi

 # Good riddance
 rm -rf .local/share/Trash/files/*
done

Save this as a script somewhere, make it executable (chmod +x script.sh) and have it run on startup (Settings > Session and Startup > Application Autostart in XFCE). All it does is wait until anything happens inside your trash directory, then nukes everything in there. So it will still say 'send to trash' in context menus and so on, but anything that goes in there will suffer a mysterious disappearance.