I do have a thumb drive onto which I’ve backed up my home folder using Unison. I just inserted it and went to a folder with the epub files. Had the same file explosion.
I used Synaptic to reinstall the four packages associated with Atril. Still got the same results so I haven’t mentioned it.
I don’t think that Atril is repeatedly scanning the directory. I think it is trying to build a thumbnail for the epub file. Something in the code is causing it to fail before it completes the task. Since it did not complete the task of building the thumbnail, it starts over again, and again, and again,…
I’m going to try a live boot session and see what happens. I’ll let you know.
LATER: I booted to a live session, went to a folder with an epub file. No file explosion!!! There was only one Atril-thumbnailer-xxxx folder created, which, I guess, is normal. Atril did however crash. I saved the crash report to my home folder and can include that if it might be helpful. Does this mean the problem might be with my install?
I have a Gigabyte motherboard, so if I have to reinstall I would like to get some suggestions/recommendations on BIOS settings beforehand.
STILL LATER: Here is an excerpt from the crash report. The entire report is 732 KB and almost 2000 lines, so probably to large to paste into here. The following lines are repeated over and over.
(caja:2061): MateDesktop-WARNING **: Unable to create loader for mime type application/epub+zip: Unrecognized image file format
(caja:2061): MateDesktop-WARNING **: Error creating thumbnail for file:///home/jim/Documents/My%20Publications/NotPeace/7173_KindleFormatting.epub: Unrecognized image file format
(deja-dup-monitor:2088): GLib-CRITICAL **: Source ID 177 was not found when attempting to remove it
(mate-power-manager:2114): GLib-CRITICAL **: Source ID 128 was not found when attempting to remove it