Ubuntu
nautilus package

nautilus - recursive copying does not work yet

Bug #186149 reported by writser on 2008-01-26

	Status	Importance	Assigned to
Nautilus	Expired	Medium	gnome-bugs #512280
Debian	Expired	Medium	gnome-bugs #512280
nautilus (Ubuntu)	Fix Released	Low	Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nautilus

Try copying something into itself. For example, copy /home to your Desktop (which resides in /home). Nautilus then starts some infinite copying cycle, copying /home to /home/name/Desktop, /home/name/Desktop/home to /home/name/Desktop/home/name/Desktop/home, etc. etc. This was tested on a clean install and upgrade of Hardy on 25/1.

Revision history for this message

tyler (durdon-tyler) wrote on 2008-01-26:

I can confirm this behaviour.

Tested after an upgrade today (2008/01/26 18:00 CET).

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Kow (kow) wrote on 2008-01-26:

I should clarify that this cannot happen. When you copy an entire folder what is being copied is evaluated on-the-fly as you are copying it. In other words, copying a folder inside itself will result in recursion (happens in any OS, this is standard behavior) BUT the bug is that nautilus lets it happen and the error is ugly. This could be/is a security vulnerability. I never checked to see how far the recursion occurred for but it happened until the path length exceeded what the filesystem allows for a max path length. The copy shouldn't start at all and nautilus should provide a nice user friendly error message saying something to the effect of "Cannot copy source folder to destination folder which is inside source folder - result is endless recursion."

Changed in nautilus:
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote on 2008-01-29:

Thanks for sent it upstream.

Changed in nautilus:
assignee:	nobody → desktop-bugs
importance:	Undecided → Low
status:	Confirmed → Triaged

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2008-03-02

Changed in nautilus:
status:	Unknown → New

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2008-04-28

Changed in nautilus:
status:	New → Confirmed

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Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson) wrote on 2008-11-24:

I can't test this until I get home, but I'm fairly sure this bug was fixed quite early on in Hardy. Can anyone else confirm if it is still an issue?

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Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson) wrote on 2008-11-24:

Ok, I tried myself and this is still an issue

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Kristopher Ives (krisives) wrote on 2009-03-03:

I've done this when it wasn't infinite and it caused my Desktop to be moved to a different place, which had drastic side effects. See my duplicate bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/337072

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2010-09-15