Gnome – Where Does Gnome/Nautilus Store Directory Icons

gnomeiconsnautilus

On some key folders in nautilus I've changed the folder icons. It looks nice, and aids my productivity because I can easily find important folders in a mass of others.

But then I move to another machine and all the folders are plain again.

So the question is where is this stored, and is there a way to have it persist between users/systems.

Best Answer

gio info

Since gvfs-info is outdated, use gio info instead. To get information about a dir/file simple use

gio info /path/to/director/or/file

After invoking this command you will get an output like 

...
metadata::custom-icon: file:///home/.../.../myicon.png
...

If you would like the exact full-path name of your icon in a script use something like:

gio info /path/to/director/or/file | awk '/custom-icon/ {print $2}' | cut -c8-

Usage: gio info [OPTION…] LOCATION…

Show information about locations.

Options:
-w, --query-writable : List writable attributes
-f, --filesystem : Get file system info
-a, --attributes=ATTRIBUTES: The attributes to get
-n, --nofollow-symlinks: Don’t follow symbolic links

gio info is similar to the traditional ls utility, but using GIO locations instead of local files: for example, you can use something like smb://server/resource/file.txt as location. File attributes can be specified with their GIO name, e.g. standard::icon, or just by namespace, e.g. unix, or by “*”, which matches all attributes

How to set an icon from command line can be found here.

A complete set of the gio commands can be found on the gnome developer page.

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