Thunar copies selected files instead of moving within the same folder on NTFS formatted partition. Steps to produce: Enter into any mounted NTFS partition. Create a folder named A. Paste bunch of files in it. Now create another folder called B within the folder A. Select all the contents within the folder A except the folder B(means select all the files in folder A, but do not select the folder B). Now drag and drop the files over folder B. You'll see that all the selected files is still present in folder A. Now when you enter folder B you'll see the files have been copied there instead of moving. Which is illogical and wastes space by creating duplicate copies of files within the same device/partition. If the partition is formatted in ext4 or FAT32(tested using a removable flash drive) file system this behaviour doesn't occur and files in foler A gets moved(instead of copied) in folder B. OS: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS DE: Xfce 4.12 (Xubuntu) I am aware of the same bug reported here- https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11526. But it was marked as resolved more than 3 years ago and I can't reopen it.
I have a NTFS partition here and it's mounted via Thunar when selected from the sidebar. Moving the files by drag and drop works as expected, without the reported misbehavior. However, when that partition is mounted via terminal with mount, this bug happens. Just for the record, this is not reproducible with Nemo nor Nautilus, so I presume it's not glib's fault, but Thunar's. Requires further investigation...
Didn't know about this problem's relation with mounting through terminal. I've several NTFS partitions and Ubuntu doesn't mount them automatically. Which creates "File not found" type problem in some applications when I try to open any file from their recent history which is saved in any of those partitions. So I've used Disks(gnome-disks-utility) to auto-mount those partitions at startup. Confirmed that this behaviour doesn't occur when a NTFS partition is mounted exclusively via Thunar sidebar. If I unmount any automounted partition(which is automounted by Disks) and mount them again in Thunar sidebar, the problem exists.
I was able to track this issue down to this chunk of code: https://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/tree/thunar/thunar-file.c?id=1fc91212395c8c14d6b60a4ca1f1cc10343f703e#n2094 So, the problem is that Thunar checks if the source file is owned by the current user, which is not the case when mounted via [sudo] mount or fstab, files will belong to root. That was explicitly introduced by Thunar's original author long ago: https://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/commit/?id=8bacc1eb9ef4c647b59514e560cd1608601c3c18 I can easily remove this part of the validation (and it works as expected), however I'm not sure what are the implications and this is a safe change.
I'm can't test this behaviour on any other file manager right now. Can you try this behaviour on other full-blown file manager like Nautilus(on Ubuntu) or Dolphin? If they doesn't share this behaviour than changing it on Thunar may not create big problem but yes it's better be on the safe side. Hoping you can investigate and act on this issue soon :-)
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