My main question is about /run/user/1000:
- Should I avoid touching it?
- Could I delete it?
- Is there something wrong with it?
Background: I’m fairly new to Linux and just getting used to it.
I use fsearch to quickly find files (because my filenaming convention helps me to get nearly everything in mere seconds). Yesterday I decided to let it index from root and lower instead of just my home folder.
Then I got a lot of duplicate files. For example in subfolders relating to my mp3 player I even discovered my whole NextCloud ‘drive’ is there again: /run/user/1000/doc/by-app/org.strawberrymusicplayer.strawberry/51b78f5c/N
Searching: Looking for answers I read these, but couldnt make sense of it.
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/162900/what-is-this-folder-run-user-1000
- https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=412850 So if its a bug with flatpaks I’m inclined to delete a certain db at ~/.local/share/flatpak/db
Puzzled:
- Is this folder some RAM drive so my disk doesnt show anything strange? Because this folder doesnt even show up at the root level.
- Are these even real? Because the size of it (aprox 370 GB) is even bigger then my disksize (screenshot).
Any tips about course of (in)action appreciated.
Only thing i saw here are general answers. /run/user/1000 resp. $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is a tmpfs (somt. like a ramdisk) created by PAM (pluggable authentication module) on login, 1000 being your user id. It is more restricted in security and size than cache and should be used for small files where quick access or security matters. A common example are sockets.
You can delete it, it will just be regenerated next log in, but your very session will run into trouble, you should log out after (if you don’t just get booted out, that is).
And yeah, like others said; this is not Windows, you don’t have to, and shouldn’t, clean up anything outside your home dir.
Nice that you are using FSearch :) I would put more excludes in it when you really want to index / In fact, apart from /home I would not index anything else than /etc /usr/share/doc and maybe /var/run/media or /media (depending on which Linux distribution you are using, for example Arch Linux will use /var/run/media and Ubuntu will use /media for removable devices).
Never touch anything in /run directory.
Thanks! And I will remove it from my search index to restrain from “decluttering”. 👌👍
I learned a lot in these comments but in this specific context:
- a flatpak app uses a base directory (mp3 player).
- I set it to my NextCloud folder.
- Now run/usr/1000 is “filled” with all my thousands of pdf from personal archive, several times per file (because multiple flatpaks).
These don’t need decluttering I learned, but aren’t managed by package managers either.
/run contains all sorts of virtual stuff, it doesn’t persist over a reboot,
I would advise against deleting anything in it as those files are used by programs running as whether user has the ID of 1000 (most likely you)
it contains things such as sockets and lock files so that programs can interact with each other
The most important thing to realize about the “file system” in Linux is it does a lot more than just persist your documents and app data. You shouldn’t index your root directory because almost everything other than your home directory is some kind of Linux distro/application-specific directory that is often not a normal directory stored on a storage device. If you run the mount command with no arguments, every line of output is a separate file system, mounted at some specific directory of the current “mount namespace”. Kinda confusing, but every process in Linux has a mount namespace that has a list of mounted file systems, often that namespace is shared between many/most processes, such as your terminal shell. Most of the file systems will be virtual i.e. not representing anything in storage. For example sysfs (always mounted at /sys), proc (always mounted at /proc), devtmpfs (mounted at /dev), etc. are all completely virtual and are ways for system services and applications to access state and devices exposed by the Linux kernel. They should never be indexed, treated as normal files, or modified by the user.
That’s probably even more confusing, sorry. But the gist of it is, the only directory on your system you can really count on actually being stored on disk and always available to you is your home directory. Basically everything else exists as an implementation detail of the operating system and software applications.
If I were you, I’d stick to only indexing your user home directory. Indexing /usr or /tmp or /etc or whatever is like indexing C:\Windows and C:\Program Files, except even weirder since at least on Windows those are actually files stored on disk whereas in Linux they may not even be actual files (although most of them in /usr and /etc are actual files on disk).
Ow … this … just realise its my Windows “legacy-skills” to unlearn …
Although its indeed more confusing it does explain rather well I cant just “port” my habits from Windows to Linux (Debian Gnome in my case).
Also it gave me hints for more research. Thanks!
You may also encounter some contradictory information out there too. For example, I said don’t modify stuff outside of your user home directory, but some people will advise to modify stuff in /etc. Although I would never do this on a desktop distro (usually /etc is set up the way the distro maintainers want it, and anything you need to modify will have another more user-friendly way to modify it), especially one where you’re mostly just trying to run desktop applications. It might make sense to modify stuff in /etc on a server installation since that’s where a lot of configuration for different daemon processes (i.e. system services but also server applications) and even software libraries goes.
That’s one of the good and bad things about linux. There is some information about all this stuff on the internet if you can find it, but it is also an information overload and you’re basically learning about the internals of the operating system with all the associated complexity. That’s one thing that threw me off about linux initially (I started getting into this stuff only a couple years ago), almost everything you learn about linux is basically an implementation detail. There are Windows equivalents to most things in linux, but when you use Windows as a desktop user you don’t really think about them unless you’re developing an application using Windows-specific APIs.
Windows has things like COM (linux equivalent is gobject and dbus), Services (linux equivalent is systemd services), Win32 API (this is a million things in Linux like glibc and a bunch of other system libraries, just check out how many files are in /usr/lib or /usr/lib64), Registry (dconf/gsettings) and so on.
There’s also unfortunately no real clean break between “stuff anyone should know” and “stuff programmers and linux distro developers should know”. A lot messier than something like iOS or Android where if you’re a normal user you basically don’t see the OS implementation or hints of it at all.
Trying to hide the implementation details is also why the GNOME Files app shows you some documents folders on the left but makes it more difficult to view the root directory or even the current file path. Which was very frustrating and confusing for me, coming from Windows.
There is a simple trick, as a basic user, do not ever run your (gnome) file explorer as root and if a permission error (requiring “escalation”) pops up you shoud double check what you are doing.
I think most graphical file mangers also keep most of the weird/important/system folders away from user and you have to directly navigate to them.
