# Trash Rox-App Help Page

## Background

If you delete something with ROX-filer (or various other linux filers) it is permanently deleted, NOT sent to the trash. (If you have deleted something just now, you may be able to recover it - look at the bottom of this page)

In 2005 Dan Van Wormer wrote the "Trash" Rox-App for Puppy Linux with help from GuestToo, to provide a counterpart to the Windows "Recycle Bin". It was subsequently updated by disciple to fix bugs and add various features.

If you have made any improvements, or if you have suggestions or bugs that you can't fix, make a post in the Puppy Linux forum, or you can try sending a personal message to disciple (I seem to be the de facto maintainer). At http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=27310 we were having a discussion about future improvements, particularly in regard to multisession puppy and to having trash directories on each drive. Nothing is currently planned, except Dan said he was going to integrate the shred utility, for securely deleting things.

## How to send something to the trash

To send something to the Trash, drag it onto the Trash roxapp from a filer window or the pinboard. You can also add the Trash to Rox-filer's "Open with" or "Send to" list. If I remember correctly, Nathan (Grafpup) suggested a hack to Rox to change the delete option to use the Trash.

You will get a prompt if you send a symbolic link to the Trash. This is just to let you know that you are not sending the original item to the Trash.

Now that you know how to send something to the trash, you will probably find everything else very intuitive, but we might as well document it anyway.

## Looking in the trash

Each trashed item is stored in a roxapp inside /$HOME/.Trash, which also contains information about the item such as the deletion date and the original path, and has a unique suffix so you can delete multiple items with the same name.

Clicking on the Trash roxapp will open the /$HOME/.Trash directory, and will update the Trash icon if the Trash is empty but has a full icon. Right-clicking on the roxapp and selecting "Look in the Trash" will also open the Trash.

Right-clicking on the Trash roxapp and selecting "View Summary" will show you a summary of what is in the trash. Disciple added this feature as there was no easy way to see the properties (particularly size) of everything in the trash. It could be improved somewhat.

## Dealing with trashed items

When the Trash is open you can click on a file to see information about it. The information window has buttons for further actions:

- Press "Cancel" if you don't want to do anything with the item.
- Press "Show" to show the item in Rox.
- Pressing "Open" is the same as clicking the deleted item in rox, so will open a deleted folder in rox, open a deleted file in the default application, or run a deleted program.
- Pressing "Restore" will restore the item to its original location. If there is now something else there with the same name, it will be trashed before the item is restored.
- Pressing "Delete" will delete the item from the trash.

You can also right-click an item in the trash to access these options directly.

It would be fairly straightforward to add buttons to the summary window for these options. We could also make the summary window display a total size for everything in the trash :)

## Emptying the trash

To empty the trash right-click on the roxapp and select "Empty the Trash". Emptying the Trash will display all the files and directories in the trash and ask for confirmation. Unless it is disabled, you can instead choose to "Quickly Empty the Trash", which will not display the contents of the Trash or ask for confirmation. You can enable this feature in AppInfo.xml, inside the Trash roxapp.

## Limitations

- Unfortunately the "View Summary" feature will not display items trashed by older versions of the Trash than the one in Puppy 4.1
- The "View Summary" feature currently doesn't display any leading spaces in the "Item" and "Name" fields - this is a gtkdialog issue, and will occur in programs like Pfind as well.
- At present everything is trashed into your $HOME folder - there are not separate Trash directories on each partition. This means you probably do not want to trash large files from elsewhere, particularly if you run Puppy from CD or a frugal install, in which case it would rapidly fill up your save file.
- There are no checks for disk space - either for space in $HOME when you trash an item, or for space in other places when you restore a trashed item.
- If you are using a very old version of Rox that does not support SOAP, when you "Trash" an item that has a link to it on the Desktop the pinboard must be restarted to update the desktop icons. You will notice a "flicker" as this happens. Such Rox versions will also not restore a desktop shortcut when you restore an item.

## I didn't understand the trash - how can I recover my deleted files?

MAKE SURE you don't write anything else to the disc they were on, or you may overwrite them. Then check out Photorec from the Testdisc package - it is good at recovering a lot of things, although it was particularly designed to recover photos from camera memory cards.

BTW if you have deleted a partition, check out Testdisc itself.