~/.gvfs not readable by root, messes up backups

[SecretCode]

I know ... ~/.gvfs is a GNOME thing. I must have acquired it installing Xfce, I suppose. Does anyone else have it on their Kubuntu installation?

Problem is it's not readable by root, and this causes errors to be returned by backup scripts (e.g. "some files/attrs not transferred" from rsync). The reason is something to do with the FUSE file system, and gory details can be found here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560658

I can't remove it as myself ("Device or resource busy") and of course root can't touch it ("Permission denied").

What to do about this? I don't want to just ignore errors in backup scripts. Do I have to build in exclusions (which could be complicated)?

[GreyGeek]

I had it on my Precise install, but it was empty, and I deleted it with Dolphin, (kdesudo dolphin" in a Konsole was not necessary)

[SecretCode]

Hmm. No, I can't delete it in Dolphin or at the command line. I must be running some app or service that holds a lock on it.

[GreyGeek]

What does "sudo service --status-all" show as running (with + mark)?

[SecretCode]

$ sudo service --status-all 2>/dev/null | grep +
 [ + ]  apparmor
 [ + ]  bluetooth
 [ + ]  pulseaudio
 [ + ]  saned
 [ + ]  ssh
 [ + ]  winbind

[GreyGeek]

Turn off BlueTooth and see if that allows you to delete that folder.

[kubicle]

Removing ~/.gvfs is not a good long-term solution if you have software installed that uses gvfs (depends on gvfs* packages), ~/.gvfs will just be recreated once you run something that uses it.

If you can't remove gvfs* packages because something that you want depends on them, the simplest option is to modify your backup scripts to exclude .gvfs ('--exclude=**/.gvfs/' option with rsync, for example)

[SecretCode]

Bluetooth is already turned off.

I think I may go with adding --exclude parameters to the script configuration anyway ... but it looks like I can remove package gvfs and the only relevant dependency that would be removed as well is brasero, which I don't need; it may have been installed as a 'recommends' of banshee.

[wizard10000]

There are only two reasons why root can't delete a file (or a directory) - either the immutable bit is set (not likely) or the directory is in use. lsof will tell you which process is keeping the file open.

You probably want to exclude ~/.gvfs from any backup script anyway

[kubicle]

There are only two reasons why root can't delete a file (or a directory) - either the immutable bit is set (not likely) or the directory is in use. lsof will tell you which process is keeping the file open.

.gvfs is somewhat of a special case, it's the mountpoint for gvfs-fuse mounts (for GIO services)...you can remove the mount point (when no mounts are active, but the mount point will be recreated on next mount) but root really doesn't have access to the fuse mounts.

Side note: looks like precise uses ~/.cache/gvfs instead of ~/.gvfs, so you may wish to take that into account if excluding.