I have a bunch of random two-letters folders on my G: drive. When I remove them, nothing bad happens but they are created after some time. Their names are hexadecimal ([0-9a-f]{2}).
There are binary "*.file" files inside them, each with a name that reminds me of a md5 hash.
An example:
i@r590 /cygdrive/g
$ ls -R ??
...
...
2f:
2feb090616ca2b7badfaeda59e4576a64a5fd726.file
31:
310cadeca062ac893fecc0842b6a8e41974fef29.file
315b3310992cd2428b0e7537a29c7a0da32ad9c8.file
319c31e39bf2ede8fde6a9105705104d4dd6b6e8.file
...
...
I tried:
$ file ff480955a23f938607eee5787f3f73ae2c692a1c.file
ff480955a23f938607eee5787f3f73ae2c692a1c.file: data
And also:
$ strings (file)
But nothing meaningful comes up.
What process might have created them? Or, if you don't know, how to monitor this in Windows?
Best Answer
These files are created by Spotify to hold its local music cache.
As these files were located in the root of one of my drives (untidy!) I simply created a folder called "Spotify Cache" and changed the location of the cache (which can be set in Spotify → Settings → Advanced) to point to this new folder.
Spotify will then prompt you to restart the program and, when complete, it will have moved the cache files to the new location.