Since I re-installed Manjaro earlier this week, Firefox acts weird when I drag links to websites to my desktop. The properties report that the permissions cannot be determined. As a result, I can’t move those links to directories using nemo or the mv command. Even as root, I can’t modify those permissions. Neither via the GUI nor via the command line.
How do I reclaim them?
Also, it seems as if those links contain the entire pages, instead of just the link, considering their sizes.
Assuming that your desktop shows the content of your ~/Desktop folder, what does ls say? 
ls -l ~/Desktop
they show the credentials right:
-rw-r--r-- 1 alicia alicia 183 Aug 25 22:50 'XDG Base Directory Specification.desktop'This makes it all the more mysterious…
Could it be that Firefox is merely complaining about the target site not being https? 
But nemo says that the permissions cannot be determined. Seems to be a nemo issue somehow.
The site is https.
But now it gets even more confusing; how can ls establish the credentials, whereas nemo can’t, and only when it is a FF link? Ordinary symlinks are treated just fine.
Somehow, the mime-type seems to play a role here as well, even though I don’t see why nemo would be concerned with that.
Somehow, nemo treats the mime-type faulty, or FF sets it wrong… The mime-type of the link is Text (text/html)
ls is not showing links, it is showing a file. I do not know what nemo is looking at/for, but it’s supposed to be a file manager — disclaimer: I am not on Cinnamon and I don’t use nemo.
Ordinary symlinks are treated as files (in fact, they are .desktop files containing the line:
Type: LinkAnd in the mime-types, shown by nemo, they typically say: Link (inode)
Thus, indeed, nemo should, and did treat links, including web links, as ordinary files that could be copied, hardlinked, moved etcetera.
Have you examined the pertinent files that nemo complains about?
I don’t know what pertinent files are? Do you mean the files that the links point to?
Instead of a file location, a FF web link contains a URL. There is no physical file on my system associated with the link.
The files that are problematic. They are .desktop files, so they should be plain text files. You can look at them and edit them.
DARN! Somehow, it contains an entire copy of the HTML itself when I open one with xed!
Then we are back to it being a Firefox issue.
There should be a setting somewhere to alter that behavior, I suppose, Since it didn’t do that before.
I already wondered why a weblink needed to be 16.4 kB…
The exact message that nemo’s properties window gives is:
The permissions of "/" could not be determined
That appears to be the case, yes. Well, either that or it’s the way Cinnamon handles drag & drop.
I’d figure that I would have the issue with other symlinks as well then. Furthermore, when I drag something from a FF window, it’s FF’s code that determines how to respond to it.
(I myself happen to be a devoted programmer).
Well, I’m not a developer and, barring some bash scripting, my coding days are already long behind me now. 
Yeah, having if only a bit of coding skill is a big help for us Linux users. If only to back-track why Linux can be such nag-ware at times 
I have another issue as well since this afternoon’s update that you may be able to help me with. I trust that it’s a far simpler issue than what we discussed so far.