Deleting Trash can

[Wander Boessenkool]

On Mon, 2004-12-20 at 15:13 -0500, Jozsef Mak wrote: 
> 
<snip class="Emptying Trashcan with Corrupted Permissions" />

> Now,  my trash  emptied without complain. These are great commands, thanks a 
> lot.
> The user thing doesn't matter because I am the only user on this computer.
> 

Hmmm, the user thingy _does_ matter, *ALOT*

When you installed Ubuntu, the installer creates alot of accounts, most
of them for specific daemons, one for root, and one (or more)
non-priviliged user-account.

Your own account is one of these, and this account will own all of the
files you create. Now if you created some files as the user 'root',
which is the Ubergod-account of your system, but the files reside within
your homedir, then you have the premission to drag them around in your
homedir. By putting them in the trah, you actually only moved them to
the .Trash directory.

Now when you try to delete those files (Emptying the trash-can), you try
to undertake an action you're not allowed to do. Only root can delete
files owned by root (unless the premissions are set non-standard). The
chown command we did as root CHanged the OWNership of those files to
your normal user account, effectively giving you the right to purge
those files...

the user-thing DOES matter ;-)



> Regards,
> jozsefmak
> 
<snip class="Emptying Trashcan with Corrupted Permissions" />

-- 
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
	-- (Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)
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