Send2Trash is a small package that sends files to the Trash (or Recycle Bin) natively and on all platforms. On OS X, it uses native FSMoveObjectToTrashSync Cocoa calls or can use pyobjc with NSFileManager. On Windows, it uses native IFileOperation call if on Vista or newer and pywin32 is installed or falls back to SHFileOperation calls. On other platforms, if PyGObject and GIO are available, it will use this. Otherwise, it will fallback to its own implementation of the trash specifications from freedesktop.org.

ctypes is used to access native libraries, so no compilation is necessary.

Send2Trash supports Python 2.7 and up (Python 3 is supported).

Additional help is welcome for supporting this package. Specifically help with the OSX and Linux issues and fixes would be most appreciated.

You can download it with pip:

python -m pip install -U send2trash

To install with pywin32 or pyobjc required specify the extra nativeLib:

python -m pip install -U send2trash[nativeLib]

or you can download the source from http://github.com/arsenetar/send2trash and install it with:

>>> python setup.py install

>>> from send2trash import send2trash
>>> send2trash('some_file')
>>> send2trash(['some_file1', 'some_file2'])

On Freedesktop platforms (Linux, BSD, etc.), you may not be able to efficiently trash some files. In these cases, an exception send2trash.TrashPermissionError is raised, so that the application can handle this case. This inherits from PermissionError (OSError on Python 2). Specifically, this affects files on a different device to the user's home directory, where the root of the device does not have a .Trash directory, and we don't have permission to create a .Trash-$UID directory.

For any other problem, OSError is raised.