rubbish.py

Note: This is a work-in-progress. Contributions welcome.

rubbish.py is a command-line interface to the FreeDesktop.org (XDG) trash bin, stored at ~/.local/share/Trash.

Rationale

The pytrash / trash-cli package works well, but has a few minor bugs, and the code confuses me, so I decided on a fresh start. Unlike pytrash, rubbish.py only supports the standard XDG trash bin, not the earlier directories like ~/.Trash, ~/.Trash-1000, etc, and it does not support per-volume trash bins.

Features

Easy date specification

It’s easy to specify dates in many formats, including natural language such as 2 months ago when using the --trashed-before option. This makes it easy to expire files from the trash bin by running, e.g.:

$ rubbish.py empty --trashed-before "2 months ago"
$ rubbish.py empty --trashed-before yesterday

Uses good libraries

As much as possible, the best-available Python libraries are used to make writing and maintenance easy.

Usage

$ rubbish.py --help
Usage: rubbish.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  -v, --verbose
  --help         Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  empty    Empty files from trash bin.
  list     Print list of items in trash bin.
  orphans  List or empty orphaned trash files.
  restore  Restore paths from trash bin to original...
  trash    Move paths to trash bin.

Other examples:

$ rubbish list --size --trashed-before today
2019-12-23 06:42:14 (2.4 GiB): /home/me/Downloads/file1.ext
2019-12-23 06:42:31 (2.4 GiB): /home/me/Downloads/file2.ext
2019-12-23 06:42:38 (2.4 GiB): /home/me/Downloads/file3.ext
2019-12-25 23:14:31 (3.3 GiB): /home/me/Downloads/file4.ext
2019-12-25 23:14:31 (18.0 KiB): /home/me/Downloads/file5.txt
Total size: 10.5 GiB

License

GPLv3+.