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I recently made a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 and I noticed an item .gvfs in my home folder.

It is very strange, since it is visible even though it has a leading .

enter image description here

What is even stranger is that I cannot determine the owner of the file:

drwxrwxr-x  2 martin martin 4096 juil.  6 17:48 .gstreamer-0.10
d?????????  ? ?      ?         ?              ? .gvfs
-rw-rw-r--  1 martin martin   68 nov.  16  2013 .hgrc

EDIT:

I am sorry, I put my question too vaguely:

  1. What is the purpose of this file/directory?
  2. Why doesn't it contain any information in ls -la?
  3. What does its presence and corruption tell about my system?
  4. What should I do with it?
  5. Why is it visible even with a preceding .?

EDIT2:

After reboot, the item disappeared.

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  • In 12.04 it's an empty folder.
    – Parto
    Jul 7, 2014 at 16:31
  • It is not a file, but a directory which should be a FUSE mount handled by the gvfs-fuse-daemon process and in your case it seems to be corrupted.
    – Radu Rădeanu
    Jul 7, 2014 at 16:51

2 Answers 2

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4

It serves as mount point for GVFS-Fuse.

gvfs is a userspace virtual filesystem where mount runs as a separate processes which you talk to via dbus. It also contains a gio module that seamlessly adds gvfs support to all applications using the gio API. It also supports exposing the gvfs mounts to non-gio applications using fuse.Ubuntu Packages

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This is a FUSE mount point. By default, FUSE will prevent other users (even root) from accessing your FUSE mounts. I believe that this directory was mounted under a different user, or you are viewing the directory through a different user.

See this question for an explanation

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