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.

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.

  • @nottellingEnglish
    14•10 months ago

    You’re going to want to look up things like symlinks, hard links, fuse filesystems, and bind mounts among other concepts. Your “whole directory” and other duplicates are artifacts of how the filesystem and process management works, and simply running fsearch or find over them is going to be confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

    One Unix concept that carries over to Linux is that everything is a file. Your shared memory space, process data, device driver interfaces, etc, all of it is accessible somewhere in the same virtual filesystem tree as the actual files.

    Because of this, there’s very little reason to have the whole filesystem indexed from root. If you’re worried about space usage, you want to work with packages through the package manager. If you’re worried about system integrity, you’ll want package validators.