[Bug 89950] User's trash suddenly includes a copy of /var/run

[Mario Vukelic]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: nautilus

I had a weird thing happening that I cannot explain, I just can describe
what I see. I am willing to investigate further if you can ask for more
specific info.

My computer was running Edgy as of this morning, but was upgraded to
Feisty just now; the issue still persists as described below:

During a vacation my computer was on, but just sat there for a few days.
To my knowledge nobody touched it (and nobody was in the apartment I
hope).  Nothing special was running, just Gnome, NetworkManager,
Evolution, Gaim, Firefox, and gtk-gnutella. Upon return I saw that my
user's  Trash icon was showing "full" and wanted to empty it. However,
nothing happened; it stayed full.

Figuring that there was a permission problem (known issue with being
unable to delete root-owned files from user's Trash), I looked into the
Trash and found that it included a complete set of the files and
directories that live in /var/run. I have no clue why those files
suddenly show up in the Trash. See the attached screenshot example.

If I try to delete the files by rightclicking them inside the Trash, I
get, e.g., "Error while deleting. "/var/run/acpid.socket" cannot be
deleted because you do not have permissions to modify its parent
folder." Given the situation, this is expected behavior since a user
cannot delete from /var/run.

If I carefully delete the files from /var/run, they disappear from the
user's Trash too.

If I "sudo touch /var/run/testfile", the file immediately shows up in
the user's Trash.

I have only 2 users on this machine, and therefore I have only 2 .Trash
direcories:

sudo find / -name ".Trash"
/home/user1/.Trash
/home/user2/.Trash

But they don't contain the files:

sudo ls -la /home/{user1,user2}/.Trash
/home/user2/.Trash:
total 8
drwx------  2 user2 user1 4096 2006-11-04 18:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 user2 user1 4096 2006-12-20 19:37 ..

/home/user1/.Trash:
total 12
drwx------  2 user1 user1 8192 2007-03-05 20:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 53 user1 user1 4096 2007-03-05 20:34 ..

** Affects: nautilus (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Unconfirmed

-- 
User's trash suddenly includes a copy of /var/run
https://launchpad.net/bugs/89950