Ubuntu – Are there redundant directories for .desktop files

desktopfilesystem

I know that the .desktop files of installed applications will be found in /usr/share/applications.

Today, I came across the directory /usr/share/app-install/desktop. It contains the same .desktop files of applications installed in my system.

So what is the /usr/share/app-install/desktop directory? Why are there two directories for the same purpose?

UPDATE: Thanks to @serg; he states this question has an answer.

Now I know what this directory is, but I still have a question:

If the .desktop files are all included in /usr/share/app-install/desktop, so why is there also the directory /usr/share/applications? Isn't it a waste of resources to keep both directories up to date?

Best Answer

The files encountered are nothing more than symbolic links to meta file data of installed programs. As Serg explained the apps using the software center go into described folder. They are not real programs but merely point were the system can cache for faster use next time. It more effective and efficient to have a system gather all programs and make meta files and symbolically link them in one area.

But Ubuntu uses two separate package managers. One is apt one is the software center. This in turn creates separate package file systems. This is how Ubuntu deals with it, but instead of throwing it all together, the two systems act like a couple. They both communicate to see what is there, both have root access to both, but they do not share what programs are installed by each other

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Ubuntu – Find directories with lots of files in

Check /lost+found in case there was a disk problem and a lot of junk ended up being detected as separate files, possibly wrongly.

Check iostat to see if some application is still producing files like crazy.

find / -xdev -type d -size +100k will tell you if there's a directory that uses more than 100kB of disk space. That would be a directory that contains a lot of files, or contained a lot of files in the past. You may want to adjust the size figure.

I don't think there's a combination of options to GNU du to make it count 1 per directory entry. You can do this by producing the list of files with find and doing a little bit of counting in awk. Here is a du for inodes. Minimally tested, doesn't try to cope with file names containing newlines.

#!/bin/sh
find "$@" -xdev -depth | awk '{
    depth = $0; gsub(/[^\/]/, "", depth); depth = length(depth);
    if (depth < previous_depth) {
       # A non-empty directory: its predecessor was one of its files
       total[depth] += total[previous_depth];
       print total[previous_depth] + 1, $0;
       total[previous_depth] = 0;
    }
    ++total[depth];
    previous_depth = depth;
}
END { print total[0], "total"; }'

Usage: du-inodes /. Prints a list of non-empty directories with the total count of entries in them and their subdirectories recursively. Redirect the output to a file and review it at your leisure. sort -k1nr <root.du-inodes | head will tell you the biggest offenders.

Ubuntu – How to associate a file type with an appimage

Got this working on Mint 18.1 Cinnamon.

The .appimage of Krita 3.1.2 didn't add any file associations, so I created a file named krita.desktop, and put the following inside:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Krita
Comment=Krita, An open source painting and drawing application.
Exec=[path to .appimage] %F
Type=Application
Icon=[path to icon]
Categories=Graphics; 
MimeType=image/krita;

I made that file executable, then copied it to /usr/share/applications.

Next I opened ~/.config/mimeapps.list, and appended:

image/krita=krita.desktop;

under the section [Added Associations]

Finally I right clicked a .kra file and chose Krita as the default app under Open With.

Hope that helps someone out.

Best Answer

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