Right-clicking on the white space in the home folder freezes Files when XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"

[jonolumb]

What Happened?

I wanted to view the properties for my home folder to see disk usage. However, when I right click on the white space between icons in the folder, Files becomes unresponsive and I have to kill it from the command line.

This doesn't happen when I right-click on a folder or file, only on the blank (white) space in the window.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Files from Dock
2. Right-click on white space between icons (in home folder, but also any other folder)
3. No menu appears, Files becomes unresponsive

Expected Behavior

A menu should appear on right-click, and the app shouldn't freeze.

OS Version

8.x (Circe)

OS Architecture

amd64 (on most hardwares)

Session Type

Classic Session (X11, This is the default)

Software Version

Latest release (I have run all updates)

Log Output

Hardware Info

No response

[jeremypw]

I am not seeing this on the latest (unstable) release of Circe. Does it happen for all folders or just your home directory? Does it happen also in ListView and ColumnView? If you navigate to /home and right click on the icon of your home directory does it happen?

To see the space used by that folder, you can also navigate to its parent and then select its icon - you will then see an overlay at the bottom of the window which will show the information you require (after a delay depending on how many files there are and the speed of you machine).

[jeremypw]

You can also show the Properties Window by pressing <Alt><Enter>. This will show the properties of the selected files or if there is no selection, the base folder.

[jonolumb]

Hi Jeremy:

1. It happens in all folders
2. It happens in all three views
3. If you navigate to /home and right click on the icon of your home directory does it happen? -> NO, this works fine

#To see the space used by that folder, you can also navigate to its parent and then select its icon - you will then see an overlay at the bottom of the window which will show the information you require (after a delay depending on how many files there are and the speed of you machine).

Yes, plenty of ways around this bug - but it's not great that Files is crashing every time I right-click on white space. Just want to feed this bug back in the hope it can be squashed.

FYI, when this bug occurs, CPU usage for Files goes to 100% before I kill it.

[jeremypw]

@jonolumb Thanks for the extra info - that helps narrow it down. Absolutely it needs fixing even though there are workrounds - we just need to find out what the cause is. I assume you have version 7.1.5+r6490+pkg135dailyubuntu8.1 of Files? You can find this information by typing apt show pantheon-files in a terminal. As I cannot reproduce it, could you try running files under gdb and getting a backtrace when it crashes/hangs?
Run the following commands in the terminal:

• sudo apt install gdb
• Close all running instances of Files
• gdb io.elementary.files
• <Enter> to get gdb prompt
• run

Files will start running. Cause the crash/hang in Files as you describe and then look at the terminal output
If Files has actually crashed due to a segfault then the gdb prompt will be focused, otherwise if Files is stuck in an infinite loop or blocked then enter <Ctrl>C to force Files to exit.

• type bt at the gdb prompt in order to get a backtrace
• Copy the backtrace and post it here.
• To exit gdb press q and then y

See https://docs.elementary.io/contributor-guide/feedback/reporting-issues/inspecting-crashes for more information.

[jonolumb]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for your help!

###@tuxedo:$ dpkg -s pantheon-files | grep Version
Version: 7.1.5+r6490+pkg135ubuntu8.1

bt.txt

Hopefully this is useful. I also added debugging symbols for pantheon-files and a few other packages using this command:
find-dbgsym-packages --install $(which io.elementary.files)

Let me know if you need more info.

[jeremypw]

@jonolumb Thanks, that shows that the problem is with the Templates submenu. The code generating this is recursive and it looks like you used <Ctrl>C to terminate the Files process rather than there being a segfault. Can you give details what is in your ~/Templates folder (or your XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR folder if non standard). Are there a very large number of items or symbolic links forming a loop for example? I've tried it with a pretty large directory tree in there without problem and it is supposed to cut off at a maximum number of templates anyway.

edit: Symlinks are supposed to be ignored so shouldn't be a problem.

[jeremypw]

Tried using an even larger number of files in Templates and while there was a noticeable delay in showing the context menu (several seconds) it did appear without a (permanent) freeze.

[jonolumb]

Okay, this helped me crack it. There was no Templates folder, I might have deleted it without realizing what it does.

I then checked .config/user-dirs.dirs:
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

I re-created the Templates folder and changed:
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"
to
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"

Files no longer crashes when I right-click in an empty space.

Takeaways:
This was clearly self-inflicted (I deleted Templates!), but there might be a more elegant way to handle things if a user deliberately/accidentally deletes that folder - I didn't manually edit user-dirs.dirs, so that line must have been changed by Files or some other process?

Anyway, thanks again for your time on this!

[jeremypw]

OK, glad you fixed it. But you are right - Files needs to deal with such situations better so I'll leave this open.

[jeremypw]

@jonolumb Just pushed a fix for this issue. It turns out there was a flaw in the coding resulting in the MAX_TEMPLATES constant not being effective (it was only honored separately for each subfolder). It is now honored globally so the max time taken to construct the menu is now tolerable.

[jonolumb]

Great stuff, thanks for looking into this!