Every rm'ed a file you needed? Of course you haven't. But I have. I got sick of it so I created a bash function. Here it is. It'll put trashed files into a $HOME/.Trash/"date" folder according to the date. I have rm aliased to it as well in my bashrc so that I still use the rm command. It'll choke if you attempt to trash a directory if that directory name is already in the Trash. This rarely happens in my case but it's easy enough to add another test and to mv the old dir if necessary. function trash(){ if [ -z "$*" ] ; then echo "Usage: trash filename" else DATE=$( date +%F ) [ -d "${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE}" ] || mkdir -p ${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE} for FILE in $@ ; do mv "${FILE}" "${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE}" echo "${FILE} trashed!" done fi } Show Sample Output

apt-get install trash-cli Commandline program that allows you put folders or files in the standard KDE/Unity desktop trash.

To prevent accidental deleting of files you can disable rm with this alias. Then use the trash command from trash-cli instead.

# put into .bashrc function trash() { if [ -z "$*" ] ; then echo "Usage: trash filename" else local TRASH="${HOME}/.local/share/Trash" if [ ! -d "$TRASH/files" ]; then mkdir -p "$TRASH/files"; fi if [ ! -d "$TRASH/info" ]; then mkdir -p "$TRASH/info"; fi local IFS_BKP=$IFS IFS=' ' for FILE in $@ ; do local BASE=$( basename "$FILE" ) local TRASH_NAME="$BASE" local COUNTER=1 while [ -e "$TRASH/files/$TRASH_NAME" ]; do COUNTER=`expr $COUNTER + 1` TRASH_NAME="$BASE.$COUNTER" done local FULL_PATH=$( readlink -f "$FILE" ) local DATE=$( date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S ) mv "$FULL_PATH" "$TRASH/files/$TRASH_NAME" if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "[Trash Info] Path=$FULL_PATH DeletionDate=$DATE" > "$TRASH/info/$TRASH_NAME.trashinfo" fi done IFS=$IFS_BKP fi }

Empty the trash when the icon stay in the non-empty state source: http://www.linuxquestions.org/blog/phoenixrising-455874/2009/3/3/how-to-empty-trash-in-gnome-when-the-trash-can-refuses-to-clear-1660/