Ubuntu – How to delete the target of a symbolic link without deleting the link itself

Unconfirmed 371801.crdownload is a temporary file that represents an unfinished download.

In general is not a virus. (unless what were you downloading is a virus)

To delete it you can try to close your browser (if is google-chrome check also that background processes are closed) and try to delete it.

If it doesn't work you can open a terminal pressing ctrl+alt+t.

Now you have to change the directory where the terminal is working with the following command:

cd Desktop

(I'm assuming that your file is placed in your desktop directory and you installed Ubuntu in English international / US).

To delete the file run this command:

rm -f Unconfirmed\ 371801.crdownload

This command will remove the file ignoring any errors. (add \ character because terminal doesn't take into account space in names). If you want more info about the command you can run from terminal this command:

man rm

If the file is still there you can try to run the rm command as superuser:

sudo rm -f Unconfirmed\ 371801.crdownload

This command will ask you superuser password and after will do the work.

In the end, if the file doesn't disappear, you try to click on your desktop and then press Ctrl+R. This will refresh your desktop.

I don't know how to make a link itself work like this, but there's a relatively easy way to get it done.

The problem appears to be that program invoked to process your data is not running with its working directory set to the location of your data file.

Instead of linking the file itself, write a launcher script and pass your file location to it as a parameter. Then, link to the script from your desktop entry.

At least in KDE, this is easier to do by adding an entry to your Application Launcher with all the parameters set the way you want them and then dragging the entry from the menu to the desktop. It has a bunch of placeholder variables that let you modify the command and even lets you specify the working directory to use.

This could be simple or fancy. Start with simple:

#!/bin/bash
## Usage: launcheroo working-directory data-file
## defending this script is left as an exercise for the reader
## ... or you can ask in the comments ;)
cd "$1"
myprog "$2" ## or your more fancy exec that will figure out
            ## what program to run by itself

invoked as:

launcheroo path-to-data-files data-file

This handles the most basic usage, and illustrates the approach, but doesn't handle any errors like bad or missing parameters

To get a little fancier, you could extract the path from the specified data file path using dirname or bash parameter editing instead of passing it as a separate parameter.

A quick and dirty way to get this done - especially for testing how it works - would be to just edit the desktop icon to run

cd where-the-files-are ; exec ...

Since this is Linux, there are probably many other ways to do this as well.

If you add the file as an icon on the desktop, you can directly edit its .desktop file and get it to do all sorts of interesting things. I haven't done much with those.

Just saw this answer which is essentially the same as mine with a slightly different spin to it.