Ubuntu – Downloads directory not opening

downloadshome-directory

I'm having a very hard time trying to fix this error message.

unhandled error message error when getting information for file /home/username/downloads no such file directory.

This is what led up to the problem.

I was working online on some files as normal and my desktop froze. I shut my Desktop down and restarted it but now the Downloads directory has dropped to the lower part of the file manger and when I attempt to open the downloads directory I get the error message above:

unhandled error message error when getting information for file

I have run the command. cat .config/user-dirs.dirs and noticed that the Downloads directory seems to be missing? 

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

I would truly appreciate some help as I have some very important files on this system I have yet to backup off site.

Best Answer

You should first check that the directory still exists and still contains your data and if it does, save it in an other folder before doing anything. My suggestion for that would be:

  1. Use ls -l ~ and ls -l ~/Downloads
  2. If you don't find it, try using locate Downloads
  3. If you find it and it as the data save it somewhere using cp -r

Once this is done, you can try to correct your configuration problem.

The configuration file user-dirs.dirs is automatically updated by the system at boot so changing it by hand will not help. To change it, you should use xdg-user-dirs (should already be installed otherwise: sudo apt-get install xdg-user-dirs):

  1. By changing the default values in the file: /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults
  2. By using the command: xdg-user-dirs-update --set DOWNLOAD $HOME/Downloads

NOTE: user-dirs.dirs~ is just a dummy file created by your editor when you edited the real file. You can change your editors configuration so that it is automatically deleted when you close the editor.

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