Massive deleting of files on start
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#19 Massive deleting of files on start
Recently, someone reported an abominable behavior when 4Pane, launched during KDE session under FreeBSD, out of nowhere started to move all files from the user's home directory to ~/.cache/4Pane/.Trash/DeletedBy4Pane/. I myself had never experienced anything like that, and casually glancing over the code did not immediately suggest why it might behave this way e.g. under KDE or any other circumstances that could trigger involuntary file deletion, but this does look rather disturbing.
Thank you for letting me know about this disturbing report. Of course I've never experienced anything like this either, even in the early days when 4Pane was experimental.
There is nothing in the code that could cause any sort of automatic behaviour. The only way I can conceive of it happening is if some other program was controlling the keyboard and/or mouse, and the 4Pane instance happened to be in focus while it operated. Extremely unlikely, but I have no better suggestion.
As for the reporter's comment:
4Pane was first released in 2008, and this is the first report of any such behaviour. If it was intended to be malign, it hasn't been doing a very good job of it.
I'll close this bug as I can't think of any action that I can take to resolve it.