mjhjmtu

I had this issue for months. Whenever I moved to my home directory within a file popup (from both qt and gtk), the window freezed and I could neither close it nor move to another directory. I just had to pkill the parent window.

Running on archlinux, I decided it was some bug due to all packages being 'too much' up-to-date, so I patiently waited and every now and then upgraded the system, hoping it will be fixed.

Nope. And Google said nothing about it.

This lead me to creating symlinks between Downloads/Documents and a few other directories so that I don't have to go to ~/ from the file popup. I had to link files from ~/ to other directories and avoid any cd to it.

I was looking at the output of ls, inspected .config, deleted some weird files like ./- (it was empty, no idea where it came from), hoping this was the root cause ─ nothing helped.

Does anybody know how to fix it? One could probably copy the whole directory to another place and begin a binary search & remove process until it works. If it does.

Today, out of frustration I was inspecting the home dir again. And I found it.

This little piece of evil. It is so absurd it could cause such trouble that I want to share my finding with you, because it cost me a lot of inconvenience and I wish it to no one.

This is the little beast:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 user users 16 Jan 19 22:06 filename -> /mnt/sdb1/VIDEO/

Looks like just a broken symlink, but this is not all. Because I have this:

$ grep sdb /etc/fstab
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 auto rw,noauto,x-systemd.automount 0 2

And everytime you reference /mnt/sdb1, it tries to mount it to /dev/sdb1. And if there's nothing plugged in and there's no /dev/sdb1, it freezes.