Ubuntu – How did I get a folder with the name of dot “.” in Recent list place

directorynautilus

I was looking in my "Recent" places in Nautilus and saw a folder named ..

Dot folder

My understanding is that a folder of the name . represents the current directory and is not an actual folder. I checked the properties of this folder:

Dot properties

There don't seem to be hidden characters in the name (like space-dot-space). The folder is in /usr/local/bin and has 4,728 items in it.

In fact /usr/local/bin has 16,512 items in it, so it can't be that (ie. the same folder as it is in).

If I open this folder by double-clicking it, it seems to be really arduino-1.6.9 (ie. its name isn't really .).

arduino-1.6.9 folder

If I do ls -la of /usr/local/bin I see (amongst other things):

nick:/usr/local/bin$ ls -la
total 156928
drwxrwxr-x  7 root nick     4096 Oct  5 14:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root     4096 Apr 10  2015 ..
drwxr-xr-x 11 nick nick     4096 May 10 19:18 arduino-1.6.9

My question is: how come the folder /usr/local/bin/arduino-1.6.9 is showing up in the "Recent" list as .?

This is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit.

Can you find the reference to /usr/local/bin there and tell us what it says ?

There seem to be a few entries along these lines:

  <bookmark href="file:///usr/local/bin/arduino-1.6.9/." added="2016-10-10T19:50:11Z" modified="2016-10-10T19:50:11Z" visited="2016-10-10T19:50:11Z">
    <info>
      <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org">
        <mime:mime-type type="text/plain"/>
        <bookmark:groups>
          <bookmark:group>geany</bookmark:group>
        </bookmark:groups>
        <bookmark:applications>
          <bookmark:application name="geany" exec="&apos;geany %u&apos;" modified="2016-10-10T19:50:11Z" count="1"/>
        </bookmark:applications>
      </metadata>
    </info>
  </bookmark>

Best Answer

I would say that the problem here is a bug in Geany, which is responsible for populating your recent files list with the faulty entry. It should be using a 'real path' instead of a path with . in it when creating these entries.

https://github.com/geany/geany/blob/12b9f27a795f7ec8c1faf6c225314a09b6c5f7af/src/ui_utils.c

I can't see where your . filepath would have come from. I tried opening a file in Geany, and the new entry in ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel that appeared had the correct filename there, not a .. But if there is some use-case where you can open a directory in Geany, then that could be how you ended up with this entry in your recently-used file list. I would simply remove the whole chunk for the recently-used file list (or delete the file completely and restart, I can't imagine that would cause problems)

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