Note to Self: When Thunar Hangs on an SFTP gvfs Session and Won't Restart

Environment

• Manjaro Linux
• xfce desktop

Problem

• I had a Thunar file manager window connected to a remote server using an ssh://user@hostname/path/to/remote/subdir URL (which uses gvfs under the hood)
• The window froze and I eventually got a "taking a long time to respond / do you want to terminate?" sort of message
• Terminating from that dialog did close all of my Thunar windows, but Thunar would not relaunch after that.

Solution

A bit of searching led me to a more or less identical issue description here.

TL;DR

There were some stray gvfsd-sftp processes still running. I killed them with:

pkill -f gvfsd-sftp

After that, Thunar opened right back up.

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Tue Oct 31 2023 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)