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Lorenz Keel
Asked: 2020-01-27 08:29:06 +0800 CST

Cannot move to trash the files that are in bind-mounted directories

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On my Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 I have an ext4 partition mounted in /mnt/Data. Moreover, I've mounted every home folder with a specific folder in /mnt/Data (using bind, no symlinks). fstab file is the below one:

# /dev/sda3
UUID=xxxxx /mnt/Data auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
# home folders
/mnt/Data/Desktop /home/<user>/Desktop none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Documents /home/<user>/Documents none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Download /home/<user>/Download none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Pictures /home/<user>/Pictures none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Music /home/<user>/Music none rw,bind 0 0
/mnt/Data/Video /home/<user>/Video none rw,bind 0 0

However, when I try to delete a file in one of the home folder (for instance, Download) I have the error message "impossible to move the file to trash, do you want to delete it immediately?"

This is the output of ls -la /mnt/Data:

<user>@<user>-home:~$ ls -la /mnt/Data
drwxrwxr-x 12 <user> <user>   4096 gen 19 16:52 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   root     4096 ott 31  2017 ..
[...]
drwxrwxr-x  5 <user> <user>   4096 gen 26 19:05 Desktop
drwxrwxr-x  5 <user> <user>   4096 set 22 22:15 .Trash-1000

My question: how can I move my files to the Trash? I've read a lot of questions about it concerning proper ownership of the folder, but I was not able to solve this issue.

fstab permissions partitioning mount trash

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In my current installation of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS I bypassed the problem replacing the bind-mounted directories with symlinked directories.

    For instance: rm -rf ~/Download && ln -s /mnt/Data/Download ~/Download

    However, continuing my research about this issue, I found the following resource: Bug 70831 - Bind mount doesn't allow to trash files and directories .

    In other words, the function rename(2) throws the error EXDEV when its input/output parameters oldpath and newpath are in different mountpoints:

      EXDEV  oldpath and newpath are not on the same mounted filesystem.
         (Linux permits a filesystem to be mounted at multiple points,
         but rename() does not work across different mount points, even
         if the same filesystem is mounted on both.)

    Therefore, as also stated in a comment:

    [...] this means that one cannot use bind-mounted directories 'normally', because there is no way to 'trash' files from such places, and the only way to delete files is permanent deleting without any possibility to restore such data. And there is not much sense of using bind-mounted directories because of that obscure behavior. [...]

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