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I am working on a c++ project and had a failed compilation (normal kind of errors). When I ran ls (a bit of a habit), it showed a file with a seemingly random sequence of characters: '!4'$'\377\377\377\377\240''c'$'\f\276\332''U'. LS highlighted it purple and it could not be opened in cat with the error cat: '!4'$'\377\377\377\377\240''c'$'\f\276\332''U': No such device or address. My file manager (Dolphin) could see the file, but when double clicked it reported that the file did not exist. It definitely exists as I was able to run the mv command to change the name (hoping it would work with the cat command). cat still gives the same error, just with hello instead of '!4'$'\377\377\377\377\240''c'$'\f\276\332''U'. What is this file and why did it show up? Also will it damage my filesystem to delete?

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Ok, after remembering to run ls -la, I found out. It was a UNIX socket file from the program I was running (apparently it was from a successful run - I thought it was a failure). I'm not sure if I should delete this question or not, but it was a simple problem of being surprised at my own success.

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