June 04, 2026 | 1 minute read | 289 words | 234.06 kB

I’ve recently rediscovered Thunderbird, but it has developed a bug, apparently because of recent XDG changes which added a new type of projects directory. The bug means that any time I start Thunderbird, it creates a directory ~/thunderbird.

I suppose I should be glad it’s in lowercase

The directory is useless. It remains empty, and Thunderbird already uses an old-style ~/.thunderbird for configuration and data, instead of respectively under the standard ~/.config/ and ~/.local/share/.

I don’t have the time to build the knowledge to fix this bug. I am, however, on record for finding applications that make directories in my home, intended or not, impolite and inconsiderate, so this will not stand.

In the rest of this post I will use the fish(1) shell as well as systemd(1), so if you use different tools, adjust as needed.

~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish:

#!/usr/bin/fish
inotifywait -m -e create ~/. | while read FILE
  echo $FILE
  if test -d 'thunderbird';
    rmdir 'thunderbird';
  end
end

The above will watch my home directory. Whenever a directory called “thunderbird“ is created, it is immediately removed. But I don’t want to run it by hand and have an open terminal all the time, so I create a systemd user service:

~/.config/systemd/user/watch-thunderbird-dir.service:

[Unit]
Description=Watch and remove thunderbird directory
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/me/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish
Restart=always
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Systemd user services need absolute paths, so adjust “me” with your username and start and enable the service:

$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/watch-thunderbird-dir.fish
$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user enable --now watch-thunderbird-dir.service

If we don’t forget to remove all this once Thunderbird have found time to solve the actual bug, the hack described here will do nicely.