Hi Paul,

Is it normal to find over 700 zero byte files in my miniBB's shared_files directory?

The files have different modification date/timestamps, and different permissions.

Some files show modification date as far back as year 1970, some show dates from last month (particularly around Christmas Day), and the others show dates in the future; e.g., 06:52:33, December 23, 2037!

The file permissions range from anything between 000 and 777.

The files do not have any file extensions, except for a couple that appear to be NFS files.

The file names are random looking, and remind me of temp files; e.g., 6xKbpg, ayoRAP.

Hope you will be able to shed some light to this situation.

-mb

They are temporary files. This problem often appears on servers, which are too overloaded and are not suffiecient to manipulate their temporary data due some possible problems on disk, or memory, or something else. I've seen this many times on really busy servers.

Is it OK to have them "collected" from time to time, if your forum runs smoothly. However it's not OK to see them, in general. That only could mean your server's operational system is too old, or outdated and can not handle all file manipulations.

You are free to delete such files manually, to save up the inodes. That should not cause any miniBB functionality.

Many thanks for your reassuring and prompt reply, Paul--it is much appreciated!
I have deleted the temporary files now, and I will make a point of checking for and deleting any temp files in the shared_files directory from now.
-marsbar