GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 582798
Nautilus should warn when opening lots of files with with separate application instances
Last modified: 2010-07-21 22:29:04 UTC
Please describe the problem: Some programs have .desktop files with %f or %u on the "Exec=" line instead of the upper case versions, either because of application limitations or bugs. When a lot of files are opened with such applications, an instance is started for each file. This can cause the system to freeze for a very long time, possibly even bring the whole system down. With this in mind, Nautilus should warn before opening files this way when file count exceeds some threshold. Steps to reproduce: Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
Do you have an example?
Example as in more specific situation? Well, current Ubuntu (Jaunty) I'm using has %f in Exec line e.g. for Exaile, Vlc, and Xine. Thus using any of these to open lots of mp3 files at once results in system going mental. Now, of course the .desktop files are buggy in these cases but as these probably keep popping up, it could be the sensible thing for Nautilus to confirm if the user really wants to start over 100 applications at once. Or maybe even refuse to. I don't know if there are use cases for launching such number of applications at once, and if there exists such it might even then be better to execute the applications serially.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 596577 ***