I am using Ubuntu 18.04 and I wanted to access a directory which only root could read or write to. I read somewhere I could launch nautilus as root with this command: sudo -H nautilus which opened a file explorer which still didn't have root permissions. This is the error that came up in the console:
$ sudo -H nautilus
Gtk-Message: 11:26:52.751: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.
(nautilus:3453): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 11:26:52.752: gtk_widget_show: assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
** (nautilus:3453): CRITICAL **: 11:26:52.752: setup_side_pane_width: assertion 'priv->sidebar != NULL' failed
** (nautilus:3453): WARNING **: 11:26:52.925: Unable to get contents of the bookmarks file: Error opening file /root/.gtk-bookmarks: No such file or directory
** (nautilus:3453): WARNING **: 11:26:52.925: Unable to get contents of the bookmarks file: Error opening file /root/.gtk-bookmarks: No such file or directory
I then found out I could reach the directory just by directing a normal file explorer to admin://<absolute path of directory>. That did it, but now every time I log into my account there's a popup showing up after a couple of minutes saying System problem detected. I am guessing it has something to do with that sudo -H nautilus I ran. I didn't reboot in between the two solutions so I can't really say.
PS: That directory I wanted to access was one created by an unfinished photorec I did to recover a file. For some reason I wasn't able to delete that directory, named recup_dir.1, because I didn't have permission.
