| 2019-07-17 21:27:15 |
Thinking Torus |
description |
I recently noticed a strange behavior on my (pretty vanilla) Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. Every time I copy some text from GNOME Terminal, using keyboard or mouse, it triggers a little hard drive activity.
Intrigued, I decided to see what was going on (persistent clipboard data?). After some investigation, I found out that the activity is due to a file being written to whenever I do a copy in GNOME Terminal (or in other apps):
~/.config/nautilus/desktop-metadata
The small file seems to record the nautilus view settings and the trash icon state, has no apparent relation to functions of the clipboard, and does not mutate following each write (the content stays unchanged).
My questions are:
Does this happen on your system?
Why?
How can I stop this?
I just tested to see if the same happens on a different computer running 18.04.2 desktop live usb, and the answer is yes. So this shouldn't be something particular to my system.
Steps to reproduce:
* Boot your computer using live CD or usb created with ubuntu-18.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso
You can obtain it from:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/
last modified: 2019-02-10 00:27
sha256: 22580b9f3b186cc66818e60f44c46f795d708a1ad86b9225c458413b638459c4)
* Start Gnome Terminal, copy some text from there, and note the current time when you perform the copying
* Check the timestamp of ~/.config/nautilus/desktop-metadata and observe it's been modified at the same time you did the copying
* repeat as many times as you like
|
Description:
I recently noticed a strange behavior on my (pretty vanilla) Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. Every time I copy some text from GNOME Terminal, using keyboard or mouse, it triggers a little hard drive activity.
Intrigued, I decided to see what was going on (persistent clipboard data?). After some investigation, I found out that the activity is due to a file being written to whenever I do a copy in GNOME Terminal (or in other apps):
~/.config/nautilus/desktop-metadata
The small file seems to record the nautilus view settings and the trash icon state, has no apparent relation to functions of the clipboard, and does not mutate following each write (the content stays unchanged).
I also tested to see if the same happens on a different computer running 18.04.2 desktop live usb, and the answer is yes. So this shouldn't be something particular to my system.
--------------------
Steps to reproduce:
* Boot your computer using live CD or usb created with:
ubuntu-18.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso
You can obtain it from:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/
last modified: 2019-02-10 00:27
sha256: 22580b9f3b186cc66818e60f44c46f795d708a1ad86b9225c458413b638459c4)
* Start Gnome Terminal, copy some text from there, and note the current time when you perform the copying
* Check the timestamp of ~/.config/nautilus/desktop-metadata and observe it's been modified at the same time you did the copying
* Repeat as many times as you like
--------------------
Expected behavior:
Copying text in Gnome should not trigger writes to some arbitrary file (and should not trigger any disk IO at all). |
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