Been playing with NFS and now I wished I hadn't

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by desertrat

Isn't it a system file?
Bet it you were to do a fresh install on a machine with nothing on it you would get a public file in your home directory.
And possibly check to see what kinda file sharing you have on.

Is it possible that ~/Public is created by GNOME? There's no Public/ directory in /etc/skel...

Come to think of it, there's no Music or Videos (etc...) directories in skel, either, so I assume Public is an artifact of GNOME.

[desertrat]

What is /etc/skel ?
I would have never looked there if you hadn't brought it to my attention.

[forkbomb]

When a new user is created using useradd, the contents of /etc/skel are copied to /home/newusername. You may notice that /etc/skel on a default Fedora install has only hidden files - mostly standard bash configuration files (this is pretty common from distro to distro). Those files then have their ownership changed to newusername.

After first logging into a new Fedora install, you'll probably notice that your /home contains directories like /home/desertrat/Public, /home/desertrat/Music, /home/desertrat/Photos (or is it Pictures?). Those must be created by GNOME, I'd assume - they're not in the skel.

[desertrat]

Hmmm?
How about trying to set up a new one with adduser in KDE? I don't have it on mine, so can't try it my self.
If it does it in KDE, then it is something other than GNOME doing it.

[JEO]

My guess is that Gnome creates the Public folder when you first log in and a few others:

Desktop Documents Downloads Music Pictures Public Templates Videos

[drayboy]

Thanks for all of your replies, but I have found a solution to this issue.

Yes I am aware that at install time a whole host of directories are created in the users home directory, a ./Public one included. Now I'm the sort of person that really doesn't like "clutter", so I delete them all. I couldn't understand why after constantly deleting this directory, it would reappear after reboot.

The only "user configuration" I have performed on this box was setup NFS for which I used $HOME/Public directory. After my testing failed, all NFS config was removed, but this Public directory kept "reappearing" , which is why I thought (and erroneously blamed NFS for the problem).

Red faced I have to say I have made a stupid mistake. Somehow I had managed to set within Gnome - System Preferences - Personal File Sharing, I'd ticked the box "share public files on the network". It seems that Gnome was creating this directory (which was why it had my UID)

I have resolved (and recreated this "nuisance" behaviour) and thus now understand it.

Thanks to all that took time to reply