How to empty trash?

[Bob]

Being a fairly new user to Linux/Ubuntu I did a stupid thing and do not know
how to get out of it.  I have a new laptop that I am trying to set up as a
replacement of an old laptop.  I copied a my home directory from a desktop that
had an upgrade fail to the new laptop as backup before trying to recover the
desktop.  I did not check the amount of space needed and the laptop did not
have enough space so the /home partition ran out of space.  I thought no
problem I would just get rid of the data I just copied.  Not having much
experience with Ubuntu I just sent the data to trash and then tried to empty
the trash.  That does not work as I found out as the system needs disk space to
empty the trash and there is none available.  To make things worse now that
/home has no space I get logged off after about 1 1/2 minutes so I have not
been able to do much experimenting in that amount of time.

So how do I empty the trash and get the disk space back?

-- 
Robert Blair


In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.  -- Voltaire  (1764)