Symlink created in all XDG user directories

No idea about the fix. Are there bugs reported?

Instead of <user> in your post, you could use the BASH variable $USER which will expand in the shell for you. There is also $HOME which expands to /home/$USER

I haven't reported the bugs yet and haven't found anyone who has, but I found something similar? on Ask Ubuntu, but his XDG user folders have been replaced by symlinks it seems, and only the empty ones (not Firefox). I don't know whether to report it to Firefox or Snap or both, and I can't reproduce it at the moment. thanks for the $USER var

For diagnostic purposes, what is the outptu of the following commands:

ls -ld ~/D*
cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
cat ~/.config/user-dirs.locale
locale

$ ls -ld ~/D*
drwxr-xr-x 8 david david 4096 Mai 20 22:17 /home/david/Dokumente
drwxr-xr-x 3 david david 4096 Mai 19 13:38 /home/david/Downloads

$ cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run.
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Schreibtisch"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Vorlagen"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Öffentlich"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Dokumente"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Musik"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Bilder"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

$ cat ~/.config/user-dirs.locale
de_DE

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-create-symlink-in-linux
"To remove a symbolic link, just use the rm command like you would to delete a file. You can also use the unlink command."

I have already deleted these symlinks thanks, I just want to know why this might have happened or any ideas on how to reproduce it.

I do not really understand how you can have a symlink "Downloads" in your home directory that points to itself, if there is a directory file with that name.

There concept of directory naming is language-aware and allows naming your documents folder either "Documents" (English) or "Dokumente" (German). It can make sense to have a link from the English name to the German one, to cater for programs that use the English name hard-coded, instead of using the XDG names.

It works I tested it I may would not recommend to test it with a directory that is important but it works, you can link a directory to a directory and when you do it it creates a symlink inside the directory that points to the directory

mkdir Test && ln -s /home/$USER/Test/ Test

And no English symlinks were created, all symlink names were German, like the XDG user directories.

The command that you give creates a link /home/$USER/Test/Test inside the directory /home/$USER/Test
That is different from /home/$USER/Test being a link.

The command I gave is an example of how it looked when the bug occurred, but as mentioned this happened for all XDG user directories, not with a directory called Test. I would not recommend running the ln command on an important directory because of this, the following command creates a Test directory and links to it.

mkdir Test && ln -s /home/$USER/Test/ Test
| |
| \_____ Links the Test directory with the Test directory
|
\_____ This creates a directory called Test

Sorry, the comment was stripped of all my spaces
first command: mkdir Test
second command: ln -s /home/$USER/Test/ Test

"first command: mkdir Test"

The effect of this command is creating a new directory below the current directory, so it is important to know what the current directory was when executing this command.

If you see a command without specifying an absolute path, you should assume that the working directory is your home directory (~).

And in my example, if you look at the second command /home/$USER, you would know that. (You should never execute a command that you have not read/know)

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