Caja behaviour - should search box follow symbolic links or not?

Support & Help Requests
1

I was under the impression that the search would not follow symlinks, but apparently it does.

Is there a reason why that search function doesn't have a Preference toggle to turn that behaviour on or off?

I saw this earlier posting:

Could my observation explain the issue for that posting?

2

I don't think so.
The original poster mentions two things:

  1. caja takes 45 seconds to scan his documentsfolder
  2. nemo and such output instantly

so this is what i thought:

  1. both search the same filesystemtype so filesystemtype is not a factor.
  2. I am convinced that both caja and nemo follow symlinks because both are forks of nautilus.
  3. 45 seconds compared to instantaniously is too much of a difference to be caused by symlinks without the user noticing the difference in searchresults.

The only explanation that I can think of is that nemo uses a diskindexer. Something equivalent to this:

 tracker/noble 3.7.1-1build1 amd64
  metadata database, indexer and search tool

N.B. I always remove this kind of software because in my case, the drawbacks outweight the benefits for me because I practically never search.

1 Like
3

So do we know why that search is following symlinks? Having it do that is, to me, counter-intuitive.

:frowning:

4

Probably to cover the largest search area span. Something that is in high demand when people don't know where their files are.

Strangely enough there seems to be no danger of circular references though (tested in /sys, which contains a lot of those). So it doesn't seem follow links endlessly.
In the end it will find the file and the canonical path to it.
It seems to be a tad more intelligent than I presumed.

But I agree that a configuration option in caja would be nice :slight_smile:

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5

But when you want to find something, you want to get the real thing, not a symbolic pointer to it, which is why I feel the symlinks should NEVER be followed, if only because it gives a duplicate reference to another file already located without the symlink. In other words, the list is offering a number of duplicates, when you really only want ONE SINGLE REFERENCE.

:frowning:

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6

I totally agree with that.

Nevertheless, a search will always only get the scope of everything below the directory of the search origin. Following links include files from elsewhere, which might come in handy in very special cases because that is why links were created in the first place.
(I'm talking here only about anything in /home/$USER and /media/$USER ofcourse, because that is the only part of the filesystem that the average joe uses)

I think that the mindset of the developers was that the average joe depends on the GUI only and thus the GUI is designed for the average joe who, according to that mindset, obviously wants this behaviour..

People like you and me are not fully dependend on a GUI, we can use commandline tools.
I think that is more or less the mindset when this was designed long long ago (most of the code of caja, being a fork of nautilus, is very very old).

Again, I agree with you and would welcome a settings option to switch this behaviour :slight_smile:

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7

I disagree with that statement.

I strongly believe that if it was explained what was happening, and the implications for results, users would not want the symlinks followed.

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8

You might be right but I can't really tell.

I have to add that I never understood the image of "regular users" in the vision of so called UX-experts.

On the other hand:
Remember that when Windows XP was launched that people queued in front of the stores to obtain a copy of that crap ? That was one of those moments when I lost faith in humanity altogether :rofl:

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9

Windoze made XP slightly better crap with the release of Service Pack 1 about a year later. LOL

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