My Filezilla client application takes forever (a.k.a several minutes) to start up if the last local directory is a remote share which is not available any more, possibly waiting for time out.

A way to fix this is to patch the Filezilla configure file ~/filezilla/filezilla.xml.

The relevant section is:

<FileZilla3>
    <Settings>
        ...
        <Setting name="Last local directory">/mnt/remote/share/</Setting>
        ...
    </Settings>
</FileZilla3>

I need to change the Last local directory value to some local directory such as "/".  That can be done easily with xmlstarlet.

$ xmlstarlet edit --update '//Setting[@name="Last local directory"]' --value "/" ~/.filezilla/filezilla.xml


Basically you ask xmlstarlet to edit filezilla.xml by updating the value of a "Setting" node with the name "Last local directory" to "/".

Of course you will have to write the output back to filezilla.xml.

You can install xmlstarlet with apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get install xmlstarlet


I am using:
- Ubuntu 14.04
- Filezilla Client 3.7.3