Ubuntu – Catfish does not follow symbolic links

18.04symbolic-linkxubuntu

I am dual booting Xubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10. I mainly use Xubuntu and occasionally Windows. To have my files accessible from both operating systems, I store my Documents, Music, etc folders in an NTFS partition and I symlink them to my Xubuntu home directory using ln.

Now, Catfish does not find a file in, e.g. Documents when I search from home directory. However, if I change the directory to Documents it does.

As I understand it, the problem is that Catfish does not follow symbolic links. However, I don't see any option that enables it to follow them. Am I missing something out? How to make Catfish follow symlinks?

Best Answer

Late answer, but indeed Catfish did not follow symlinks. This has changes with version 1.4.10, where, according to the release notes:

"Symbolic links are now traversed, with actual paths only processed once"

That version of Catfish is available in (X)Ubuntu 19.10.

To make it work in (X)ubuntu 18.04, you could try installing the more recent version on your (X)ubuntu 18.04 installation. The Xubuntu QA Staging repository has the 1.4.10 version for 18.04 (with thanks to Kevin Bowen for pointing this out). Alternatively, you could "mount bind" the ntfs folders in fstab instead of symlinking them. That is a more complicated solution than symlinking, which requires root permissions to implement, but that way, the folders will appear to catfish as regular folders.

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