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?
Convoluted name and a lot of null bytes? Sounds like a temporary file used during downloading.
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.
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.
Have you checked the shell command history? (e.g,
history | grep spotify
)I do this every now and then by hamfisting a dd or curl command. The most irritating thing about it is the need to open a GUI in order to delete the file since I can’t reference the garbled filename from the CLI.
Yes, that was annoying. Especially because I didn’t have a GUI file manager installed.
I use the fish shell and it can usually autocomplete all manners of strange file names in a way it can understand
Make a directory with 256 files, each filename starting with a different byte, and see how it does.
you have entirely foss Bless hex editor right there, no need to use online stuff