Mystery junk directories keep getting created in /home/pi

decoherent

I couldn't find a good way to search for this, so sorry in advance if this is a known issue! As a quick disclaimer, my install seems to work perfectly, with no obvious usability problems.

I've been using RetroPie on a Pi 3 for a couple months now (installed from the official image), and periodically I have these mystery directories that appear with garbage as their names. It's easier to just show a screenshot from WinSCP:

Mysterious

These cropped up before, but I just deleted them and went on my way. They've since reappeared a couple times though, and now I'm wondering what exactly could be creating them. During the creation dates of this batch of directories, I don't think I was even using the machine. Does anyone know what on earth is going on here?

edmaul69

@decoherent not sure what is causing the question marks for you but i use the mac os 8.1 on basilisk, mac files that have a tm logo in the name look like that on winscp. So it could be a font that windows doesnt recognize.

decoherent

That is a good thought...I just went and took a look via putty (with a couple different fonts), and then on the actual Retropie box (by quitting emulationstation), and I see substantially similar stuff. On the console itself, the diamond-question boxes render as solid squares. Putty was even less helpful, yielding:

pi@retropie:~ $ ls
???               fstab-backup  ????LE  RetroPie            RetroPie-Setup
es_input.cfg.bak  ??"?GNSO      ȯh      retropie-backup.sh  x?1?XX

The files themselves have weird contents. This time, they've got stuff like this:

pi@retropie:~ $ cat x?1?XX
Sd55d:01:N/A
Sc03c:00:N/A
Sd636:00:N/A
Sda3a:09:N/A
pi@retropie:~ $ cat ???
SC8ade:a5:c6:N/A
SC987c:a9:c6:N/A

I'm not familiar with numbers in this kind of format.

Darksavior

@decoherent might be a bad microsd. I've had that happen on junk USB sticks. Try another microsd to verify the problem.