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Re: /.cache directory



Greg Wooledge wrote on 26/09/2025 13:15:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 10:53:33 +0200, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote:
Avinash Sonawane wrote on 25/09/2025 17:59:
I'm using Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) which I recently installed. I
noticed that there is a directory named ".cache" at root level. It
seems to be created at the time of installation. What is it? Who has
created it? Seems to be a bug in some package which has created it...

$ ls -la /
total 76
drwxr-xr-x  19 root root  4096 Sep 23 12:17 .
drwxr-xr-x  19 root root  4096 Sep 23 12:17 ..
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root     7 Sep 15 06:58 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  4096 Sep 23 12:18 boot
drwx------   2 root root  4096 Sep 15 07:08 .cache
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root  3620 Sep 25 20:30 dev
drwxr-xr-x 160 root root 12288 Sep 25 20:34 etc
...

Hi,   probably, it was created by an installer script. By going through the
log (files) of dpkg, it may be possible to narrow down the list of candidate
packages using the creation time of /.cache.

Why do you assume it was done by an "installer script"?  Based on the
timestamps, it looks like it was about 10 minutes after the installation
created the /bin symlink, which is either short enough that it *could*
have happened at a late stage of the installation, or long enough that
it *could* have been done by Avinash shortly after the installation.

Yes, I have to correct myself. I had this problem on Debian testing sometimes before trixie was released. If my memory serves me right it was not the installation script but the service script of the package alsa-utils (in my case /etc/init.d/alsa-utils) that calls the command alsactl. I hadn't installed the package alsa-ucm-conf. This in turn let the service script fail without notice and left a /.config . After installing alsa-ucm-conf the service script would no longer leave a /.config directory.

Therefore, also some service script could be the culprit.

Regards,
Jörg.

<snip>


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