Gnome (the desktop environment, not the creepy garden fixtures) has a “Trash Folder,” which is the functional equivalent of the Windows Recycle Bin. This is slightly problematic for those of us who are used to file “deletion” on Linux instantly unlinking the file, who don’t expect that the files are being moved somewhere. Especially as the developers made the icon a little more obscure, putting it in the very bottom right corner of the taskbar, where I overlooked it for quite some time. Now that I know it’s there, it’s easy to purge, just like I empty the trash bin.

But for geeks like me, you’ll be happy to know that the “Trash Bin” is nothing more than a directory, ~/.Trash. Thus you can empty it fairly easily, with “rm -rf ~/.Trash/*”  And you can use all the routine Linux filesystem tools: “ls” to show what’s in it, and “du -sh ~/.Trash” to list its contents and show the total size.

Update: Newer distros are putting it in ~/.local/share/Trash/files/ instead of ~/.Trash