0 file in root?

[Dani]

I just noticed from within the finder that the root of my drive has a file, with no extension, called 0, that is a 0 byte file. Does anyone know where this could possibly have come from and whether it's save to delete? It should be, no? I'm thinking maybe it's a file needed by one of my apps which will eventually write to it? I dunno.

[kc0arf]

Hello,

I did not find such a file on my 10.3.4 computer... then again, I have one of the oldest computers that can run OS X.

Who owns the file? What group?

I would suggest that the file is not bothering you, aside from the nagging question of where did it come from. You might wish to run Disk Utility and do a scan and permissions thing on it.

Otherwise, let sleeping dogs sleep...

Christian

[dwoodhouse]

I've been curious about this empty file too. Yes you can delete it, but it comes back again anyway.

I thought it may have been created by Firefox, but it appears to have been created by a root user, so that doesn't make sense.

Let me know what you find, because this is bothering me too...

thanks
Dean

[cosi]

I have a suggestion and an App idea. Perhaps you can just look at this mystery file and take note of that last accessed / last modified date. Take a look at it again in a week or few days or so. If it hasn't been updated, it's probably safe to delete.

Here's the App idea. There are commecial apps that look for least used files to delete and free up space. It would be nice to have an application that could be given a list of files to track. This app could log or notify you when a file is being accessed. Hmm... security would even benefit from this app.

I personally do not have this file on my system. I think it should be harmless to delete, especially b/c it has no information in there.

Ed

[samdeane]

I've also noticed this. I suspect it's caused by something that we're all using (unless it's something viral of course).

For me it seems to be present on my servers, but not my desktop machines.

Is anyone else using postfix? Anyone turned it on using Postfix Enabler? That's one of the things I've done on both of the affected machines.

I've also got VNC server running on both of them, but I've also got it running on a machine that isn't showing the problem (I do regard it as a problem!).

[dwoodhouse]

A defect in a script used by OSXvnc (Server) appears to be the culprit. See here for the bug report and fix...

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=999965&group_id=64523&atid=507763

Thanks
Dean

[redage]

deleting certain zero-bytes files can kick you out of your system. root is the master mind that is allowed to do anything, by the way.

[kc0arf]

Hello,

Yes, it is dangerous to delete a 0 byte file.

Linux / Unix scripts allow you to touch a file, meaning, make a file, and have it filesize=0. Programs can do that to keep track of things, or simulate a lockfile condition for programming.

If file exists, then do this.

Christian

[Dani]

Hmm ... are you sure it's OSXvnc? I used to use that app a long while ago. However, nowadays I use OS X's built-in "remote desktop" server, which seems to work fine with my Windows VNC client. I've done a clean install on my mac since I've downloaded / used OSXvnc.