scoped_dir folders in downloads directory
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rejzor last edited by
I'm getting this nonsense with currently latest Opera and it's idiotic. Had to google it and that led me here. And it's not in TEMP folder, but in my actual DOWNLOADS folder.
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spudz76 last edited by
A browser causing several gigabytes of free space being filled out with duplicate files -
how could they possibly not classify it as a "problem" or a "bug"?
For what I understood from this topic, the folders and files are temporary and are removed when Opera is closed. So for majority of users, this is not exactly an issue.I don't power off my computer nor close my browser unless it crashes. I don't like bookmarks, I use about 50 tabs across 4-5 windows, thus why I never close it.
I have a whole ton of scoped_cruft dirs and I also am tired of this bug.
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badbod last edited by
WoW!, this thread is sooo old, and yet the bug persists. I too keep getting mountains of these annoying folders building up in my downloads folder. I have no idea if they vanish on browser close or not as I never close my browser. I have rebooted a few times, and just tested after boot by opening and then closing Opera, so I can confirm they are NOT removed when closing Opera.
I guess the devs don't come here given how long this bug has been around.
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sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by
This is a user forum, though a few of the devs have been known to visit. If you want to report a bug, the place for that is https://bugs.opera.com/wizarddesktop/
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
I have no idea if they vanish on browser close or not as I never close my browser. I have rebooted a few times, and just tested after boot by opening and then closing Opera, so I can confirm they are NOT removed when closing Opera.
When you rebooted, did you close Opera first? Opera probably doesn't clean them up if it doesn't get to shut down properly. The OS is supposed to notify you/Opera that it's shutting down so that Opera can properly close, but I don't know if that situation works properly in Opera. So, I would make sure you explicitly close Opera yourself before choosing to reboot if you haven't been.
Also, for folders that aren't deleted when they're supposed to be (because of improper shutdown of Opera for example), I'm assuming those ones will never be automatically deleted by Opera in the future as Opera lost the handles to those folders or something. As in, they got removed from the "to be deleted on closing" list.
So, what I would do is go to "Downloads" in Opera and clear all your downloads. Then, I would close Opera and manually delete all those scoped directories in your downloads. Then, from now on, make sure Opera is closed properly. If for some reason it isn't, and you downloaded something, immediately check your downloads folder and get rid of any that are left behind so they don't build up.
With that said, Opera probably needs a better strategy for this. Maybe it should tag the scoped directories it creates with "opera" or something and then always any opera-related scoped directory on close (or maybe even asynchronously on startup).
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rejzor last edited by
This thing is really irritating. How on earth can this be so incredibly hard to figure out by devs? It's not like all Windows apps just randomly create "scoped_dir" named folders for the downloads. There is obviously a piece of code in Opera that does this specifically under certain situations entirely unknown to users.
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by burnout426
@rejzor said in scoped_dir folders in downloads directory:
This thing is really irritating. How on earth can this be so incredibly hard to figure out by devs? It's not like all Windows apps just randomly create "scoped_dir" named folders for the downloads. There is obviously a piece of code in Opera that does this specifically under certain situations entirely unknown to users.
Delete any scoped_dir folders that you currently see. Then, for new ones that Opera creates, are they getting deleted when Opera is properly closed by you? If so, then it appears to be intended behavior. The directories not being created in the temp directory seems to be intended behavior too when the downloads folder isn't on the root drive.
Not saying things couldn't be improved.
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rejzor last edited by
@burnout426 WHY!? Why does it matter where folders are located? That's just dumb. Windows has standardized TEMP folders if they need to use. For everything else, if Opera has write rights, just write the damn file in there. Instead making a folder within a folder where it's suppose to actually save the download file makes even less sense. So, they have the rights to create a folder within a designated folder and create a file in there. If you can do that, then why not just write that very file into the "root" folder instead of creating scoped_dir in there?
And monitoring this is especially stupid. It doesn't seem to create them on every single download, otherwise my Downloads folder would be absolutely filled with them. But yet, they keep on being created there somehow (or being left there).
I mean, obviously there is a logic/mechanism behind it and a developer could easily know in a second what it is. If anyone ever bothered to even check for this.
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by burnout426
@rejzor said in scoped_dir folders in downloads directory:
And monitoring this is especially stupid. It doesn't seem to create them on every single download,
It's when you download an exe and launch it from within Opera from the download dialog/bar.
WHY!? Why does it matter where folders are located?
I would imagine the idea is that if the download directory is somewhere else than on the root drive (like a usb stick or other personal hard drive), it's a privacy issue to create the temp files on the root, so they're created where the download directory is at. It's just a guess though.
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rejzor last edited by
@burnout426 No other browser does this and yet they all work just fine. How come, eh?
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
@rejzor said in scoped_dir folders in downloads directory:
@burnout426 No other browser does this and yet they all work just fine. How come, eh?
I'm having trouble producing the problem in both Opera and Chrome right now, but Chrome was doing this too when I initially tested this problem. If you look up scoped_dir issues, they're usually Chrome/Chromium issues (and Opera uses Chromium).
But, even if Chrome's not doing it, some Opera devs will have to answer the "How come?". I can just suggest that Opera is usually more conscious of privacy and security. Then again, it could just be a side effect of the way Opera implement the UI.
I'll keep trying to reproduce the issue again.
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by burnout426
@burnout426 said in scoped_dir folders in downloads directory:
I'm having trouble producing the problem in both Opera and Chrome right now, but Chrome was doing this too when I initially tested this problem.
I was able to reproduce in Opera again (not Chrome though). I forgot the drive had to be NTFS for it to work (I assume it's required for the security measures for the directory).
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rejzor last edited by
@burnout426 Anyone actually still uses FAT32 these days for things other than USB drives?
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
@rejzor Not sure. It was indeed a usb thumb drive I was testing with.
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
FWIW, I filed bug DNA-65689 with a good description of the problem and good steps to reproduce; to try to get some official answers on the behavior and to fix and improve things. Pointed to this thread also.
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burnout426 Volunteer last edited by
Okay. The reason for creating the scoped directories is to prevent DLL hijacking when launching executables that don't use safe DLL searching. By launching the executable from within a separate folder, it prevents dangerous DLLs (that you accidentally downloaded or were tricked into downloading) in the downloads directory from being used by the executable instead of the real, safe system versions of the DLLs.
The exe that's placed in the scoped directory isn't a copy of the exe. It's an NTFS hard link to the original (which you can check with
fsutil hardlink list filename), so it's not taking up extra space. By default, the scoped directory is placed in the system %TEMP% directory. However, if you set the download directory to another drive, the scoped directory must be created on that drive instead (in the downloads directory for example) because NTFS hard links can't cross file system boundaries.These scoped directories are deleted when Opera properly shuts down.
So, Opera is doing this to protect the user from this type of attack, and all of Opera's current behavior with the scoped directories is correct / expected.
However, more-robust handling of cleanup of the directories might be investigated.
Hope that helps.
