How to quit GNOME file copy GUI after it hangs

Question

Many times I find GNOME file copy GUI tool (Nautilus) irritating when it stops working. It happens when:

• I cancel the copy or move
• I try to copy to blue tooth exchange folder to my friends laptop(when he forgets to permit the operation or if the file is big)
• some other times, it just hangs while copying

So I obviously get irritated with this and I want to quit the operation immediately. Unfortunately whenever I try to cancel it, it never works. This happened to me several times so I tried to find the process ps aux| grep copy or cp or something like that but I m never successful. Maybe it has become a zombie process I guess.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no way to rescue Nautilus (file manager for GNOME) when it hangs. You are left only with the option of killing it, so go to the command line and run:

killall nautilus

After that, it should automatically restart, and then you can try again.

This is just a bug in it. Try avoid parallel copying at once, though I'm not sure if that's what triggers the behavior, but it tends to be a slower operation anyways, compared to serial copying.

Note that Nautilus doesn't invoke the shell's copy commands, that's why your ps attempts didn't help. It uses different technology (GIO and/or GVFS).