Holy WTF?! What is this?

[JustGretchen]

I am over at a friends house doing some work on their new 24" iMac and they have a few Macs from which they have done some data transfer...I'm trying to get all this straightened out at this point for them, because it became quite messy.

Anyhow, I just was looking through the Mac HD to see where all things got thrown and I notice all these funky looking files in the User folder.

They were all created 1/19/09 at 10:43am.

Any ideas?

 

[MacBoobsPro]

Ok that would freak me out!

This is just a wild guess but during one of the transfers did they turn off the mac or lose power or something? They almost look like corrupt files from an interrupted transfer.

EDIT: Or are they 'hidden' files that aren't actually hidden? Either way it looks nasty and I wouldnt know what to do without know exactly what happened and being in front of the mac to figure it out. Others may have a much better (read less dramatic) reason.

 

[JustGretchen]

They say all transfers went according to plan. Each file is also 0 KB and will open with textedit and contain nothing.

 

[MacBoobsPro]

They say all transfers went according to plan. Each file is also 0 KB and will open with textedit and contain nothing.

Maybe they are temporary files. Put them in the trash (without emptying it) and run the mac as normal for a while see what happens. If nothing screwy happens then it should be safe to delete them. Especially if they contain nothing.

 

[JustGretchen]

That was my thought too.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Adobe (in at least the CS3 version of Photoshop and probably more Adobe apps) is documented to leave bizarre empty temp files that resemble those, but those are normally contained in /Users/username/Library/Preferences. The Adobe ones can run anywhere from two or three bizarre character up to (more commonly) around the length of the ones you showed.

With those just being in the /Users folder though, I just don't know! One good thing about your post was that it reminded me to go prune those out of my Prefs folder though as I try to remember to do that every 6 months or so!