tlug: Filename star

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Subba" == Subba Rao <subb3@example.com> writes:

    Subba> To remove this I did,

    Subba> $ rm -i *

    Subba> and got rid of it.

$ rm -i '*' will save hitting the 'n' key a few times.

    Subba> I don't know how this file got created. What is the best
    Subba> way to trace the creation of such files? I want to know the

Look at the contents.  Too late....

If the file is open at the time, fuser(1) will tell you who is using
it.  You probably also want to look at the creation date (the time
listed by ls(1) is modification date).  `man ls' should tell you how
to do that.  file(1) may be able to tell you what kind of file it
probably is even if the contents are unreadable to humans.

Otherwise you can't know what (Unix) process created it.

    Subba> process that is creating it. External login is impossible

Does it have a net connection at all?  If so, what makes you so sure
that creation of files by external agents is impossible?  In fact, it
seems more likely that a program that knows nothing of the shell
metacharacters would create files like that, so an externally
controlled shell is actually not a likely source for such files.

    Subba> to this box. It has to be one of the several tools I have
    Subba> downloaded and compiled.  How do you search for files, with
    Subba> meta characters as their names?

su -c "find / | grep '[*?]'"

is a start, variations an exercise for the reader.  (If external login
were possible, I would suggest looking for '...' and files with
control characters as names, etc.)


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