[PLUG] File won't stay deleted

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2016 18:19:28 -0800
Daniel Hedlund <daniel at digitree.org> dijo:

>On Feb 10, 2016 14:46, "John Jason Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>> I spoke too soon. I was away for a couple of hours and when I
>> returned the file was back.
>
>1. Delete the file and replace it with a 0-byte file.  Change
>ownership to root so your user can no longer modify it:
>$> chown root:root /path/to/file.
>
>Keep an eye on it to see if the ownership permissions change or it
>grows in size again.  Look at the system logs to see if any apps or
>kernel log an error because they could no longer write to it.
>
>2.  Delete the file and keep an eye on Internet usage for a download
>spike.  If your router doesn't have the ability to see that info, you
>can probably keep an eye in the total amount of traffic received in
>the network info returned by ifconfig.  Write down or copy & paste
>that value and compare it with the same output later.  That will tell
>you if it's a result of syncing over the network.  I think canonical
>has some cloud sync functionality built in, or used to anyway.

First, to keep this saga up to date, the shred command failed. I had
hopes that it would work, but the file is back.

Solution #1 above seems like a good idea, or at least an experiment. I
deleted the file and then created a new 0-byte file with the same name,
and chowned it to root. I ran ifconfig and copied the results to a text
file, with the date and time. 

I might add that your theory that something is syncing it makes sense.
That would explain why when it reappears the file size is sometimes
less that 4.6 GB - it just hadn't finished syncing when I discovered
it. However, I might note that every time I see that it is back the
file size is always at least 2 GB. If it is being synced from somewhere
I should have caught it when it was only just started at least once in
a while.

We shall see what happens.