Is there a way to view Windows recycle bin information from Linux?

Question

I have several Windows hard drives with various files in their respective recycling bin directories:

$RECYCLE.BIN

Is there a way to view information about these files to tell if they are no longer needed?

Answer 1

In Windows XP and earlier, you can use the command line utility rifiuti to read the INFO2 file.

From Windows Vista and newer, use strings -el -f \$I* from the /$RECYCLE.BIN/{SID}/ directory. This will print out a listing of the original filenames for each file in the Recycle Bin.

-el tells strings to look for 16-bit little endian character encoding;

-f tells strings to print filenames.