[SOLVED] does highlight color via gio/gvfs use space at file location?

zub · 2024-01-24 09:35:25

Finally I found out how to programmatically apply FG and BG colors to items in Thunar:

gio set -t 'string' "FILENAME" 'metadata::thunar-highlight-color-foreground' 'rgb(50,50,50)'

(note for anyone else coming upon this who wants to try: as I understand it, gio has recently replaced a collection of tools with names beginning gvfs-. Even though gvfs- is now deprecated, it is still widely available so depending on distro that might be the correct command. To do something like the above you would use gvfs-set.)

My goal was to color code sections of an external storage. I know it sounds weird but I tend to get lost in these files because the tree is so deep. If everything was color-coded according to the top directory I would at least know where I started.

So I threw the above in a bash script and set loose on the sections of my filesystem with find like this:

find /path/to/files -exec SCRIPTNAME "{}" \;

A few times concurrently for the various sections of the filesystem.

So it is and external ~500gb ext4 encrypted SDD which that had ~450GB files on it. Not used for system or user home or anything, just storage.

It is mostly comprised of smaller files though, like documents, images, textfiles, data. There are zillions of items. It causes weird problems sometimes to deal with so many small files; the computer chokes.

After it was running a while, I realized out of space on the drive. 0 bytes available.

Did the above cause this? Or did I do something else without realizing it? I was kind of poking around but not sure what I could have done to cause 100% of space to be used.

I thought the information about highlighting was kept in the user's home directory in db file. Is it kept with the files somehow also? Some sort of cache?

Maybe one way or another it is an untenable idea to color code so many individual files in this way. Regardless of where it is stored, is having so many entries in the db pushing it beyond what it is designed to do?

thanks to anyone who read that. weird problem I know.

Last edited by zub (2024-02-02 12:08:39)

ToZ · 2024-01-24 19:16:39

It will increase the size of the files in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata as thats where all of that data is stored. What does:

ls -l ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/

...and:

du -ch ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata

...look like?

Its also possible that is was something else.

zub · 2024-02-02 12:08:10

I think it must've been something else.

The second `du` command shows the directory to be 35mb. With 30mb being used by a file who's name corresponds to the uuid of the external ssd.

Compared to 3mb total directory size for another user on the same system which has not been abusing the file manager quite this badly.

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#1 2024-01-24 09:35:25

[SOLVED] does highlight color via gio/gvfs use space at file location?

#2 2024-01-24 19:16:39

Re: [SOLVED] does highlight color via gio/gvfs use space at file location?

#3 2024-02-02 12:08:10

Re: [SOLVED] does highlight color via gio/gvfs use space at file location?

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