Nautilus file operations problem

Robert Nichols rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net
Sat Feb 6 21:00:01 UTC 2010


Paolo Galtieri wrote:
> I tried to copy a file from my hard disk to a USB flash drive using drag 
> and drop and the nautilus file manager.  When I did this a file 
> operations window popped up showing progress of the copy.  It stopped at 
> 245.5Mb of 278.6Mb, however, when you look at the destination file it is 
> in fact all there.  Doing an md5sum of the source file and the 
> destination file shows them to be the same.  I removed the destination 
> file and tried the copy again, and this time it stopped at 246.5Mb of 
> 278.6Mb.  If I try to unmount the USB drive it fails with volume is 
> busy, even though the file has been copied over completely.  If I try to 
> force the unmount it fails with volume busy.  Eventually (after about 5 
> minutes) it seems to finally recognize that the copy is complete and 
> allows me to unmount the drive.  If the file has completed copying why 
> does the nautilus file operation popup take a long time before it goes away?
> 
> No matter how many times I do the copy the nautilus file operation popup 
> takes several minutes to report completion.
> 
> I'm running F12 with all the latest updates.

Nautilus is waiting for fsync() to return, indicating that the data has
actually been written to the device.  Unmounting is similarly waiting for
the writes to complete.  When you think you are looking at the file on
the device, all you are really seeing is the data in the kernel's buffer
cache.  Writes to USB drives max out at around 30MB/s, so you should
expect it to take 9 minutes or more to transfer that 278MB file.

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.



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