I found a binary file with a gibberish name in my home directory. Its content seems to be just hex zeroes when I open it in an online binary viewer. It doesn’t have execute permissions. It seems I accidentally ran spotify --uri= around the time the file was created (I could not replicate).

Can I safely ignore this as some bug with a program that tried to write to a file?

  • palordrolap
    8•6 months ago

    You could run an offline fsck to make sure it’s not being caused by disk corruption or something. An offline malware scan at the same time wouldn’t hurt, however unlikely. (That is, boot from external media so you know the drive’s not in use.)

    The file command might be able to identify it if it’s of a known format, but if, as you say, it’s all zeros that won’t be particularly fruitful (it’ll just say “data” if a test on my own computer is anything to go by).

    Or you could lsof | grep theweirdfilename to see if any active processes are using it, not that this would show up if it was malware (which is unlikely, especially if you did that scan earlier).

    If, as you say, it’s all zeros, you could just bzip2 it (or similar) if you don’t want to delete it for whatever reason. That way if something complains you could uncompress it again.

    That said, if it doesn’t show up as useful and isn’t fixed by any of the above it’d probably be OK to delete it.

    • @driveway@lemmy.zipOP
      3•6 months ago

      You’re right, file just shows data. lsof did not return anything either, I had already renamed the file to be able to reference it in the terminal anyway.