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I have a PDF with a link to a web page, that used to work (it would open the link in firefox, via xdg-open). However, when I click it now, literally thousands of xdg-open processes are started and plasma-desktop runs at 100% cpu.

I don't know how to start troubleshooting this. What could cause this issue?

An example of a problem PDF is here.

Here is a screenshot of what happens. Note the corrupted taskbar due to thousands of xdg-open instances Here is a screenshot of what happens. Note the corrupted taskbar due to thousands of xdg-open instances

Supernormal
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  • In which application are zou trying to open it. – Bruni Sep 22 '15 at 12:05
  • Firefox is my default web browser, so in this case it would be firefox. – Supernormal Sep 22 '15 at 12:08
  • I am using Kubuntu 14.04 and browsed the pdf through firefox and the link opened just fine in my case. Could you please show us a screenshot regarding your issue? – Raphael Sep 22 '15 at 12:14
  • Ubuntu 14.04, FF 40.0.3 works as expected. Same if I download and open with evince. Have you tried the latter? – Bruni Sep 22 '15 at 12:21
  • I don't think it's a problem with the PDF, but rather with my configuration of KDE, and xdg-open in particular. I've added a screenshot in the question now. – Supernormal Sep 22 '15 at 12:47
  • You could reset your userprofile to default as explained here https://askubuntu.com/questions/109530/how-do-i-restore-my-kde-desktop-to-default to verify your assumption. I cannot recreate this on my KDE machine (this is not Ubuntu however) – Bruni Sep 22 '15 at 17:17

3 Answers3

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I just encountered the same issue, but then for opening a mailto: link. The approach to debug the problem is probably similar to yours, however.

First, find what handles the mailto (or in your case, http) scheme:

$ xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/mailto
kmailservice5.desktop

Now, what is kmailservice5.desktop?

$ locate kmailservice5.desktop
/usr/share/applications/kmailservice5.desktop

Opening the above file shows:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=kmailservice5 %u
Icon=mail-message-new
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/mailto;

X-DocPath=kioslave5/mailto/index.html
NoDisplay=true

# KMailService is the handler for mailto URLs
Name=KMailService
...

I wonder what kmailservice5 does?

$ kmailservice5 --help
   xdg-open -- opens a file or URL in the user's preferred
   application

Synopsis

   xdg-open { file | URL }

   xdg-open { --help | --manual | --version }

Use 'man xdg-open' or 'xdg-open --manual' for additional info.

This is exactly the same output as xdg-open --help! That's weird... I looked up the source of kmailservice5 and found http://api.kde.org/frameworks-api/frameworks5-apidocs/kio/html/kmailservice_8cpp_source.html. It is a simple application that calls QDesktopServices::openUrl https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qdesktopservices.html#openUrl (In KDE4, the mail application was explicitly invoked via KToolInvocation::invokeMailer; My partial upgrade to KDE5 is probably the reason for this breakage).

In other words, mailto:... opens the handler of mailto:, which opens the handler of mailto:, etc. This never ends and the only way to end this loop was to issue killall kde-open plasma-desktop.

To solve the issue I created a robs-mailto.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=kdialog --msgbox "Rob's mailto handler: %u"
Icon=mail-message-new
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/mailto;

Name=RobsMailtoHandler

and registered it as follows:

$ xdg-mime default robs-mailto.desktop x-scheme-handler/mailto

and verified that it was correctly registered:

$ xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/mailto
robs-mailto.desktop

$ xdg-open mailto:test@example.com
# (opened a KDialog window that printed the email address, as I specified)
Rob W
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  • OK, I just fixed the --help issue, that was an easy one (http://commits.kde.org/kio/b37a93681ed0de79cd86c39d4aecc49c164a7000). The actual bug is tracked in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354151 / https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344527, I'll look at that next. – David Faure Apr 20 '16 at 07:33
  • The mailto: recursion is now fixed (fix will be in KF 5.22). You can apply the fix locally right now: just delete kmailservice5 and PREFIX/share/applications/kmailservice5.desktop. – David Faure Apr 22 '16 at 15:04
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Yes, don't make xdg-open the preferred application. Because the job of xdg-open is to find out the preferred application. Infinite recursion ensues.

In other words, xdg-open is a "client" of the mime/apps preference system. One has to specify somewhere what actually is the preferred application, and that can't possibly be xdg-open itself.

Did you set xdg-open as preferred app for text/html, or was that done by your distro?

David Faure
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It seems the culprit was a bad setting in Dolphin, where the default "open as" action for html files was xdg-open, which I guess caused an infinite loop. After changing the default program to Firefox instead, it works as expected.

I would have thought that having selected Firefox in "System Settings / Default Programs" would have sufficed, but apparently not.

Supernormal
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