[geeks] Solaris 10 mystery

[Phil Stracchino]

Fellow geeks,

I just discovered that /tmp on my Solaris 10 box has sprouted a large
number of identical two-byte files named /tmp/xfile.(\d+).  The numeric
parts are seemingly random, but look like they might be process IDs.
Each contains 0\n.  None are in use.  Their creation times are
apparently random, and I can find no evidence for their being created by
any script known to me.  They are owned root:root, mode 0644.  They have
the following frequency distribution by date:


      1 Apr 22
      1 May 20
      1 May 26
      1 May 29
      1 Jun  4
      1 Jun  5
      1 Jun  6
      1 Jun  7
      2 Jun  9
      1 Jun 16
      1 Jun 19
      1 Jun 21
      1 Jun 23
      1 Jun 24
      3 Jun 25
      2 Jun 26
      3 Jun 27
      5 Jun 28
      2 Jun 29
      1 Jun 30
      1 Jul  4
      2 Jul  5
      3 Jul  6
      1 Jul 10
      1 Jul 11
      1 Jul 12
      1 Jul 16
      2 Jul 17
      2 Jul 18
      1 Jul 19
      6 Jul 20
      7 Jul 21
     18 Jul 22
     24 Jul 23
     52 Jul 24
     67 Jul 25
    123 Jul 26
    221 Jul 27
    380 Jul 28
    639 Jul 29
   1108 Jul 30
   1954 Jul 31
   3212 Aug  1
   5388 Aug  2
   9412 Aug  3
   7247 Aug  4


Anyone ever seen this before?  Any theories as to what might be creating
them?


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, SQL wrangler, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.