"Documents" folder missing file type, cannot be opened

**monkeybrain2012** · July 7th, 2013

It seems that your Documents folder is somewhere else rather than in your home. If you have moved it around within your file system (not to an external drive) then you should be able to find it and put it back to your home (now that after editing user-dirs.dirs it is reassociated with nautilus)
Do

Code:

sudo updatedb
locate Documents

The first commad updates your database to reflect recent changes, the second locates the item.

**Luxx** · July 7th, 2013

I see it in my home folder where it belongs, but my computer doesn't. It still thinks it is in a folder on my desktop, where is hasn
t been for weeks. Yet that is where terminal is finding it.

**Luxx** · July 7th, 2013

I see it in my home folder where it belongs, but my computer doesn't. It still thinks it is in a folder on my desktop, where is hasn
t been for weeks. Yet that is where terminal is finding it.

**Luxx** · July 7th, 2013

My computer thinks my Documents folder is a desktop configuration file. I found another folder, Examples, that it thinks is a desktop configuration file as well, but I can still open that one and access the files inside.

**mc4man** · July 7th, 2013

Try opening this Documents.desktop in a text editor like gedit. If so what does the Exec= line say (if anything

**efflandt** · July 8th, 2013

Maybe instead of copying the ~/Documents/ directory to your desktop you only created a "Documents.desktop" link to your Documents directory. However in X that would just show "Documents" (or whatever Name= in that file), not the ".desktop" extension. Look at that contents of Documents.desktop with a text editor and see if that gives any clue where your Documents directory went. Or you can install "Main Menu" (alacarte) and open .desktop files with that.

Did you delete your Documents directory after you "thought" you moved it and did you empty your trash since you did that?

**Luxx** · July 13th, 2013

Well, what's confusing me is that I dragged it. I didn't copy and paste it. When I dragged it, there wasn't one left behind to delete, yet what I thought was my folder is just a link and the folder seems to be gone. I have no idea what happened to it. I created another one but as far as the stuff I had in the old folder, I guess sometimes you just have to start from scratch.

Thank you for trying to help me sort it out.