[SOLVED] file and folder beginning with a -

[Markverhyden]

Not sure what's going on here so I thought I'd ask if anyone has seen something like this.

Running ownCloud 10.x on a CentOS 7 VM in ESXi 6.5. Been running fine for a couple of years. Started acting up yesterday so I logged in. Turns out I had run out of disk space but this is not related to that.

While I was cleaning things up, etc I consoled in using root. When I ls root the below showed up. There is a file named -a and a directory named -p. Figured out I should be able to access them by using a command then ./-a etc. However the system reports no such file or directory. I created a file named -v and was able to operate on the file using ./-v. Have another CentOS 7 VM running Axigen. Checked that instance and don't have those files. None of the other user accounts on either machine has anything like that. Looked around in logs, etc nothing obvious.



Edit: posted this over at the CentOS forums as well and a Mod's suggestion solved the problem. Even though it looked like - it wasn't the same. Suggested copy and pasting the string and works. So when in doubt copy paste, don't trust you eyes.

 

[NJW]

Interesting - thanks. The question is, where did they come from? What happened on 29 September to drop those two, two minutes apart?

 

[Markverhyden]

Interesting - thanks. The question is, where did they come from? What happened on 29 September to drop those two, two minutes apart?

Yeah, that was a big concern. The -p directory is empty and the -a file just have "ftpuser" in it. Turns out the vsftpd.conf file has a last mod with the same date and time. I know I had FTP problems on that server so it may have been fiddling around with the root account for testing (I know it's far from best practice). Suppose it might help is I logged my activities. LOL!!!

I do run this with SEL set to enforcing mode which is a bit of a comfort.