[PLUG] Nautilus sees files, but cp does not

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:52:05 -0800
Robert Miesen <robert.miesen at gmail.com> dijo:

>Have you tried running an ls -a command in the affected directory as root?
>If running the command as root reveals the hidden files, it is possible that
>the directory containing the two troublesome files doesn't have read
>permissions set for non-group members. If that is the case, running chmod
>o+r <yourHomeDir>/Desktop as root should fix the problem. Alternatively, you
>could either change the group membership of the folder in question (with the
>-R option enabled if you want to apply group membership changes recursively)
>or add yourself to the group the folder is a member of. If you choose the
>last option, you'll need to logout and login for your permissions to become
>effective.

I became root with su. The ls command as root failed to see any of the files
that Nautilus showed with an X on them. That includes ls -a, or any other ls
option. 

Because the files in question had spaces in them I tried typing them with the
tab auto-completion. But the tab auto-completed only the one file that didn't
have the X on it in Nautilus.

The mv and cp commands also failed to see the files. 

There were not just two files. I mentioned two just as examples. My old ~/
folder had 38 GB of data in it, comprised of many thousands of files. Nautilus
displayed about one in 15 with an X on it, and in each and every case, the X
files were invisible to the terminal. The logic behind which files had an X on
them in Nautilus completely escapes me. In the three files I cited as examples,
all three were PDFs downloaded from Portland State by me (the old Jaunty me,
that is). According to Nautilus the Properties tab showed the permissions as
identical for all three files. WTH?

I'm beginning to wonder if I have stumbled into a bug in Nautilus. Wait ...
it's not just Nautilus, but the command line as well. Maybe the filesystem? But
the filesystem is ext3. A bug in ext4 would be credible, but not ext3.

I know a lot of people use a separate partition for ~/, but I have never seen
the logic of that for a laptop. I have just one disk. If the disk crashes I
lose everything anyway. And I'm not ordinarily into installing new distros
alongside my main distro. If I wanted to do that I'd use Virtualbox.

That does remind me that it's about time to do a full system backup, now that
my migration to Fedora is pretty much finished.