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I accidentally made a spelling mistake while creating the user during installation of Ubuntu 16.04. I had to rename my username and home folder later (I did something like this). Now, the Nautilus icon takes me to the new home folder alright but other links like Downloads, Documents etc within the home folder seems broken.

Links

And I get the following error message:

Error

I checked the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file whose contents were as follows:

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

This looked proper and I went and checked the $HOME variable in terminal as below:

user4@user-pc-4:~$ eval echo $HOME
/home/user4

This clearly is fine. I tried xdg-user-dirs-update and also a reboot. Still the links are broken. How can I fix them?

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skrowten_hermit
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1 Answers1

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This was solved by actually fixing broken nautilus links. I realized that these links are nothing but the same bookmarks on the left pane of your file manager. All I had to do was:

sudo gedit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks

This opens the configuration file and you could edit the links by following the format below:

file://<full_path> <bookmark_name>

for directories and

smb://<IPv4_address>/<shared_directory_name>

for shared folders on network (using samba).

That's it! You may even add other bookmarks by specifying the paths here.

Another (easier) alternative for broken paths (works only for folders created by user) is:

  1. Right click on the directory name left pane of bookmarks.
  2. Click Remove.
  3. Navigate to the path of the directory using the file manager (nautilus).
  4. Hover to Bookmarks menu, click and select Add Bookmark.

More info can be found here and here.

skrowten_hermit
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