Lol, what? - Weird X11 stuff

#1

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This is one of life's great mysteries.
Every stacked directory is the same, what I don't get is there's a limit so it's not a recursive directory loop.

It goes quite deep:

cd /usr/bin/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/

Even weirder:

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#2

Yes. I see multiple X11 softlinked directories just like you.

#3

Same here and I’m getting weird desktop behavior, lost right click desktop menu, lost the nvidia logo on boot, artifacts after wake from suspend.

Is this why its happening?

#4

I still have my right click menu and have noticed nothing else that might appear suspicious. Should we try just deleting the chain of soft linked X11 files?

#5

Try it! lol

I’d wait a while, if we all have it then I guess its a bug or an update which has gone wrong which should be fixed.

I just fired up the liveUSB ISO and its the same in the live file system ?*?**

#6

It’s simply a folder that links back onto itself. I think there is a kernel limit eventually, but nothing seems unusual here, as my system has the same.

This should answer the question:

/usr/bin/X11/ is a symbolic link (symlink) pointing to /usr/bin/. Hence it contains itself and you can follow those X11 folders all day long but there’s still just one on your disk.

This is for compatibility reasons as some programs expect some other program to be in /usr/bin/X11/ but Ubuntu puts them in /usr/bin/.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/191654/why-are-there-infinitely-many-x11-subdirectories-in-usr-bin-x11

3 Likes
#7

Thanks lah7. Sound of me slapping my forehead.