this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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You could run an offline
fsckto 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
filecommand 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 theweirdfilenameto 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
bzip2it (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.