[SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

arbitarycounterfactual · 2024-10-09 09:03:27

The filename seems like an ANSI escape sequence preceded by \' enclosed $. I've seen this pattern of files appear recurrently in the home dir, ignoring its content I clean it up at its each occurrence. Today I had this occasion of looking at its content, seems like the pacman manpage. So what's the deal here? What is causing its frequent appearance?

Naively, my intuition suggests: something I did which caused the shell to interpret something nasty which is causing the creation of the file ''$'\033' (and alike) in the home directory (or perhaps whereever I'm launching the man page from, i.e., /home/user in this case)

Last edited by arbitarycounterfactual (2024-10-17 09:41:58)

seth · 2024-10-09 13:03:40

Bogus script, $HOME is likely just the PWD.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Audit_ … ies_access - but unfortunately that will show some binary that cat invoked by some shell script - probably not all that helpful.

What's your shell?
bash? zsh? fish?

If it's however constantly the pacman manpage it'll be something that tries to show that, some AUR helper maybe?

arbitarycounterfactual · 2024-10-10 21:05:36

I'm using bash.

seth wrote:

If it's however constantly the pacman manpage it'll be something that tries to show that, some AUR helper maybe?

I'm don't have any AUR helpers installed but why would it feel like creating a file out of the blue in $HOME? I suspect it's being done while inside the `less` view of the manpage, as apparently this phenomenon is closely followed after reading manpages.

seth · 2024-10-11 08:02:44

Do you also create other manpages this way?

man man

type -a man groff less
printenv

arbitarycounterfactual · 2024-10-11 12:50:42

What do you mean by "create"? Yes, viewing manpages is done though `less`.

$ type -a man groff less
man is /usr/bin/man
groff is /usr/bin/groff
less is /usr/bin/less

I have a bunch of scripts in the printenv

seth · 2024-10-11 15:17:14

I mean, if you run "man man", does that dump a weirdly named copy of the man manpage into your $HOME ?
There's nothing offensively obvious in your environment and the relevant binaries are the default paths

arbitarycounterfactual · 2024-10-17 09:41:35

I've set up an audit rule for the offending file path, thus creation of another one of those might alarm the audit logs as to pinpoint what exactly is causing the generation of such files. It might be not as useful as I might want it to be though. But for now, none of these weird files have been dumped from man, so for now marking it as solved,

Arch Linux

#1 2024-10-09 09:03:27

[SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

#2 2024-10-09 13:03:40

Re: [SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

#3 2024-10-10 21:05:36

Re: [SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

#4 2024-10-11 08:02:44

Re: [SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

#5 2024-10-11 12:50:42

Re: [SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

#6 2024-10-11 15:17:14

Re: [SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

#7 2024-10-17 09:41:35

Re: [SOLVED] pacman(8) manpage dumped as ''$'\033' in my home directory

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