<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> On 2/23/2013 4:58 PM, P Bielecki wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:51293B99.2040208@gmail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">23.02.2013 20:44, John Hupp: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">I understand that the Public folder for each user is a vestige of other/older implementations that employed the Personal File Sharing tool (gnome-user-share). It gives the impression of being like a Windows "Shared Documents folder but does not function as such. It can be deleted, but something restores it again. Does anyone know how to permanently delete this for each/all users? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Hi John, I think the mentioned dirs are created at user login by /usr/bin/xdg-user-dirs-update executed from /etc/X11/Xsession.d/60xdg-user-dirs-update Have a look in /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf and try setting XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="" or perhaps enabled=False or changing content of the following for each individual user: ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs I hope this helps. cheers! </pre> </blockquote> Thanks for the very helpful clues (and to Chris Green for confirming part 2 of that). Since I was more interested in a global application, I looked at /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf. The portion of interest there reads: # This controls the behaviour of xdg-user-dirs-update which is run on user login # You can also have per-user config in ~/.config/user-dirs.conf, or specify # the XDG_CONFIG_HOME and/or XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to override this # enabled=True I don't know what "or specify the XDG_CONFIG_HOME and/or XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to override this" means -- where, for instance, those values should be specified. But it seemed to me that setting enabled=False here might cause xdg-user-dirs-update not to run. And again, I don't know what the consequences of that would be. There didn't seem to be support for entering XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="" here in this file. But sitting right there also is /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults. And there, changing PUBLICSHARE=Public to PUBLICSHARE= gave me what I was looking for. Oddly enough, event with key search words from your post, I could not find official documentation of this anywhere at wiki.ubuntu.com or help.ubuntu.com. There is <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TIPs_of_use_ubuntu">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TIPs_of_use_ubuntu</a> which looks relevant, but there is something wrong with the page's coding and its rendering makes it nearly useless. </body> </html>