Problem with .gvfs or .gvfs* in Fedora 11

[Ron Yorston]

"Steven F. LeBrun" wrote:
>First, Emacs froze when I tried to list my home directory, then "ls -a" 
>froze from command line.  Through trial and error, it appears that there 
>is a file, directory, or special file in my home directory that begins 
>with ".gvfs".  Any attempts to list the contents of the directory that 
>should include .gvfs* fails and locks up the program that issued the 
>command; emacs, ls -a in bash shell, etc.  The close icon in the upper 
>right hand corner of the frame will cause a pop-dialog to appear that 
>allows the program to be "force quit".
>
>Any ideas on how to resolve this problem?  Can I safely do a "rm -rf 
>.gvfs*" or will that delete files that my system needs?
>
>The command "ls -ad .gvfs*" also locks up which leads me to suspect that 
>.gvfs is a special file, such as a device, instead of a directory.

It should just be a directory, but it's used as a mount point by
gvfs-fuse-daemon so it has special magic properties.  Several people
have complained about it, the most common problem being that backup
tasks run by root can see that the directory exists but when they
try to access it the get permission denied.  This confuses them and
may cause the backup to fail.

The .gvfs directory isn't essential to the functioning of GNOME. 
GNOME applications that use gvfs do so through an API, not the
directory.  It's provided as a 'convenience' for non-GNOME applications.

It's possible to prevent gvfs-fuse-daemon from running and thus
taking over ~/.gvfs.  This is only partially documented and it took
me a while to work out how to do it in a way that won't be broken
by future updates.

Create the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/00-gvfs-disable-fuse.sh
with the follwing contents:

   GVFS_DISABLE_FUSE=1
   export GVFS_DISABLE_FUSE

Log out and log in again.  ~/.gvfs should then be an ordinary directory.

Ron