OT: Excess files

[Paul Mooring]

Sysinternals has a lsof equivalent (pslist I think?) to let you see what
process is currently using a file.  As far as if they're safe to delete,
there's no magic here any different than Linux best you can do is prove
it's not being used *right now*.  Software that writes files to disk does
so with whatever permissions the process runs as, so if you're lucky you
can list the file owner and make an educated guess.  That being said you
can't really ever know a file is safe to delete if you don't know what put
it there.  I would run some malware scans, I used to use malwarebytes and
MS security essentials (but I've been out of the game for a *long* time)
and if the system seems clean leave files in there alone.


On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 12:01 PM, <joe at actionline.com> wrote:

>
> I previously inquired:
> >> On my wife's win-xp laptop, a huge number of files seem
> >> to have shown up and I have no idea why or what they are for.
> >> Hundreds of them seem to be in these sub-directories:
> >> C:\I386\IIS6.CAB
> >> C:\I386\COMPDATA
> >> C:\IBMWORK\XPLOCALE
> >> C:\IBM\WORK\QVIDEO
> >>
> >> How can I figure out what they are for or
> >> if they can just be safely deleted (I hope).
>
> Thanks to Stephen, Keith, ET, and Paul for responding ...
>
> but I still don't understand if it would be relatively
> safe to just remove all those excess files in those directories?
>
> Joe
>
>
>
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-- 
Paul Mooring
Operations Engineer
Opscode, Inc.
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