Dangerous Over-Delete - 'Single-File Shift-Delete' on NTFS deletes ALL

[Graeme Harrison]

Binary package hint: nautilus

Like lots of people with dual-boot systems, or external USB drives that must be read elsewhere, I have some volumes which are NTFS.
Using latest Ubuntu with Nautilus 2.22.5.1, I went into a user-area of my XP NTFS drive (a sub-directory within 'My Documents' and successfully copied the contents to another drive (no problems thus far).
I then sat with Nautilus having my XP volume's 'My Documents' folder open and with the highlight bar (in rhs pane) highlighting just the sub-directory that I wanted to now delete and I pressed 'Del'. The sub-directory had about 500 files of average size 20kb (ie total of 10MB of data) in it. The Nautilus interface then asked if I really wanted to delete contents of 500 files and I confirmed 'OK' (still all as one would expect thus far). The Nautilus dialogue box then said 'Preparing to Delete and started showing the count of how many files it was preparing to delete, and the total amount of disk space involved. When it cliimbed to 4,500 files representing 4GB I clicked 'Cancel' to stop the whole volume (or maybe just whole of 'My Documents') being deleted. The 'locus'/'focus' of the Delete function (the span of action) got confused between the asking about 500 files, but then proceeding to find thousands of files that matched.

So, for further experimentation as to whether the bug was related ONLY to deleting directories, I then clicked within that particular directory and did a 'Ctrl-A' to select all files and then pressed 'Del' or 'Shift-Del' (can't remember which) and it also wanted to delete way too many files.

So to narrow it down, I selected just the first file in the directory and pressed 'Del' and it correctly deleted just one file (after saying it could not go to trash). So I tried on the second (now top of remaining files) file in list and tried 'Shift-Del' and it mis-behaved, checking if I wanted to delete all 500 and (I think) then selecting thousands more before I clicked 'Cancel'.

I'm strongly advocating Ubuntu (eg see my posts on Linux v Vista on Zdnet: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista-shunned-in-business-survey/0,130061733,339292397,00.htm and http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/Rudd-wants-computer-cooperation/0,130061702,339292316,00.htm

But if we are to get XP users to convert, they are most likely to try dual-boot, and if we delete whole volumes of their NTFS files when they thought they were deleting just a tiny portion, we'll get clobbered for such incompetence.

I think this is a high-priority bug, and moreover, with any new version of Nautilus, someone should have one or two NTFS volumes (eg USB hard drives) attached for compatibility testing. The Kernel seems great, most of the major apps are great, the minor utilities are a bit light-on in functionality, but the BIG problem is that Nautilus is way too buggy and/or non-intuitive.
Graeme (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. What you describe is weird, shift is not supposed to change the focus and doesn't on my ubuntu installations. Is the issue specific to ntfs? Do you get the same bug using the menu action? Could you describe an easy testcase scenario to trigger the issue?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Could you also try to write short and clear description of how to trigger the issues you are having? Describing details is a good idea to give indications on the bug but ubuntu gets hundred of bugs every days and easy steps to trigger the bug and clear description make easier to go through bugs than having to read detailled user stories description

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

We are closing this bug report as it lacks the information, described in the previous comments, we need to investigate the problem further. However, please reopen it if you can give us the missing information and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future.