UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I didn't create a file named 1.
Somehow I saw this file in several occasions.
Does someone know what I did trigered it?

I dont pretend to know what you actually did to produce the results you see!!! You could have done a number of things....like touch 1, or did a redirect of output from within a script to a file called 1. It wouldnt be a stretch to think that you did this by trying to redirect STDERR and/or STDOUT.

How about posting what it is you are trying to do in your script or at the command line.

I normally will find this file after several days. So I don't remember what I did to create it.
I am just a beginer in Unix. I don't even know how to use touch.
Or the rest of the things you mentioned. :-(

The only thing that I remeber that I could do is I have been trying to edit the same file from different terminals. I don't know if this will create some kind of chaos to trigger the system to create a temp file for me??

How are you editing the file? Are you using vi? what commands were you trying to use?

Yes .
Vi

Do an ls -l on this "1" file, what does that show... What is inside the file (more 1)? Have a look at when the file was last modified (in the ls -l listing) - what were you doing then?

Where is this file? Is it in /tmp? your home directory? elsewhere?

If it keeps reappearing, it could be something your doing, or maybe a cron job is putting it there? (Check your crontab - if you're allowed to use cron, that is).

Questions, questions, questions!

Cheers
ZB

If you were in vi and now have a file named 1 you could have created this from the vi command prompt with something like:

:w 1

Easy to do something like this when starting to use vi ......