Ubuntu – Deleted Items not appearing in Trash folder. Stuck in .TRASH-1000

There's a recipe on webupd8.org for this. To prevent link rot, here's the important information (with a few additions).

sudo apt-get install trash-cli

This will install trash, empty-trash, list-trash and restore-trash commands, which you can use as-is or make rm an alias of trash (see below).

The semantic of the trash command is a bit different then the standard rm - it doesn't require -r flag in order to be able to delete directories. If this bothers you, webupd8.org proposes the following script, which you can put in your PATH and call it trash-rm:

#!/bin/bash
# command name: trash-rm
shopt -s extglob
recursive=1
declare -a cmd
((i = 0))
for f in "$@"; do
    case "$f" in

        (-*([fiIv])r*([fiIv])|-*([fiIv])R*([fiIv]))
            tmp="${f//[rR]/}"
            if [ -n "$tmp" ]; then
                #echo "\$tmp == $tmp"
                cmd[$i]="$tmp"
                ((i++))
            fi
            recursive=0
        ;;

        (--recursive) recursive=0
        ;;

        (*)
            if [ $recursive != 0   -a  -d "$f" ]; then
                echo "skipping directory: $f"
                continue
            else
                cmd[$i]="$f"
                ((i++))
            fi
        ;;

    esac
done
trash "${cmd[@]}"

In Ubuntu 12.04 and later, the last command in the script should be trash-put "${cmd[@]}" instead of trash "${cmd[@]}" (as the command has changed from trash to trash-put).

Then make the script executable:

chmod +x trash-rm

Once you have it in some directory in your PATH, add an alias to your ~/.bashrc, which will make bash to invoke your script instead of the actual rm command:

alias rm="trash-rm"

As djeikyb correctly points out, the .bashrc alias trick would only work for the user whose .bashrc is modified, and only in bash terminal session.

And that should be it.

This is the folder of you paperbin.
If you delete something it will not be deleted from disk. It will be moved to this folder instead.

Try to empty the paperbin or delete the folder with the terminal-command as root:

sudo rm -rf /path/to/folder/.Trash-1000