Strange files in top-level folder

[mfacey]

For some time I've had 4 files in my top-level folder in Finder. I'm talking about that folder that contains the Library, Users, System and Applications folders.
The files that are unknown to me are called ~AUT0002, ~AUT00020, ~AUT0068 and ~AUT00680. They don't have extensions either. Anybody know what they do and if they can safely be removed?

 

[yellow]

Never seen em.. what is in them? How big are they?

 

[mfacey]

Never seen em.. what is in them? How big are they?

When I open them in Textedit its nothing but a big long document of funky characters. The sizes range from 140KB to 570KB.

What I think I'll do is hide them on my external drive for now and see what happens when I run for a while without them there. I'm guessing they must be something like temporary installer files or something like that.

 

[yellow]

Well, it's NOT "normal", that's for sure.

IMO, just move them to another folder and see if they are re-created.

 

[ravenvii]

Hmm I got a weird file in my top-level folder too... called gmon.out. Coincidentally (or not?) I can't access my iDisk anymore, says "the volume for iDisk cannot be found".

 

[yellow]

Looks like it's a log used for debugging.

http://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.15/gprof/Executing.html

 

[chaos86]

yeah lots of badly written (often ported) apps do this. quake 3 for osx/ppc g4 does this too.usually just a log and you can delete it and it will reappear when you launch that app again.