10

I wanted to have some of the sub-folders of my home directory (like Music, Downloads,Videos) on my hard-disk-raid instead of my SSD. Therefore I deleted those folders in my home directory, recreated them on the RAID and made symlinks pointing from my home-folder to the RAID (e.g. /home/user/Music > /mnt/home-big-data/user/Music).

However, the newly created folders don't have the correct meta-data-properties in Gnome 3 (wrong icon, folders won't open as Music folder, etc.).

Which is the best way to remap those features to the folders on the RAID?

I tried editing the /home/user/.config/user-dirs.dirs and setting XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads" (according to the symlink) but it was resetted to XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/" after reboot.

Another thing I tried was using gvfs-set-attribute to reset the standard-icon, but this also failed.

Which would be the correct way to do that?

Marcel
  • 1,114
  • 1
  • 14
  • 28

3 Answers3

16

Most likely, your user-dirs are reset to $HOME/ each time you reboot because those locations are not available on session startup when xdg-user-dirs-update is automatically run.

After editing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs a possible solution is to prevent xdg-user-dirs-update from running (and resetting your configuration at each session start up) by adding enabled=False to your user-dirs.conf:

    enabled=boolean
             When set to False, xdg-user-dirs-update will
             not change the XDG user dirs configuration.

So to disable it only for your user account, add enabled=False to ~/.config/user-dirs.conf (this will override system-wide settings). If you want to disable it for all users add that key/value to /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf.

Marcel
  • 1,114
  • 1
  • 14
  • 28
don_crissti
  • 79,330
  • 30
  • 216
  • 245
  • 1
    If the `~/.config/user-dirs.conf` does not exists, simply create it with `echo "enabled=False" > ~/.config/user-dirs.conf` – Cyril N. Feb 10 '17 at 15:33
2

Edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs, then run xdg-user-dirs-update.

lcd047
  • 7,160
  • 1
  • 22
  • 33
  • I tried editing `~/.config/user-dirs.dirs` and pointed to the symlinks (like `XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"` not to the "real" path `/mnt/home-big-data/user/Downloads`. I didn't run `xdg-user-dirs-update` but I rebooted the computer - the changes in `~/.config/user-dirs.dirs` were reverted. Did I make a mistake (except not running `xdg-user-dirs-update`)? (I hope that's not a stupid question, I cannot try it at the moment as I'm not home) – Marcel Jun 03 '15 at 09:27
  • 1
    @Marcel That depends on your particular OS. The relevant files are `/etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf`, `/etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults`, and `~/.config/user-dirs.dirs`. Perhaps there are `man` pages or HOWTOs about updating them on your OS. – lcd047 Jun 03 '15 at 11:02
  • it's Debian Stretch x64 with Gnome 3 desktop. Should be exactly as you stated... – Marcel Jun 03 '15 at 11:08
  • hey @lcd047. I tried your solution (see above in my edited post, thank you), but sadly it didn't work... Do I have any other options to try? – Marcel Jun 04 '15 at 00:41
  • @Marcel Like I said: your best option is to find docs that describe what you're supposed to do on (the right version of) your OS. I hopefully pointed you towards _what_ to look for. I don't have Debian Linux, and I won't venture to guess blindly what contortions the Debian maintainers have come up with, sorry. – lcd047 Jun 04 '15 at 03:50
0

If anyone still has this issue, xdg-user-dirs-update --force will solve your woes.

Stephen Kitt
  • 411,918
  • 54
  • 1,065
  • 1,164
Jorjes
  • 1
  • Using "xdg-user-dirs-update --force" UNDID the changes I just made in my ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file. I would instead like to make my changes to the user-dirs.dirs take effect, in File Manager, Firefox, etc. – MiloNC Apr 21 '22 at 17:06