I fear this question will have an embarassing answer, but I just found a large file tree in /var/tmp/filexQ70qA on my Debian Woody system. The contents seem to be some form of the Debian packages database. filexQ70qA/ contains a huge number of directiories (~ 5000--BTW, that takes a while to list in ext2 ;) ), each named after a Debian package. Each of those directories contains a single file of the same name, whose contents is the packages entry for that package (eg, libapache-request-perl/libapache-request-perl contains "Package: libapache-request-perl\n..."). The whole tree takes up about 50 megs.
Is there any known program that creates such a tree? Or, is there some archive that unpacks to this structure? I can't imagine that any standard Debian tool does this. The dates (mtimes and ctimes) are all from back in March. However, my system recently went from ~60 Mb free on the disk down to 0 (which is the reason I started looking for disk hogs and found this anomaly), so I'm slightly suspicious. Needless to say, I don't remember creating the tree myself. Can anyone put my mind at rest by suggesting how this came to be? A direct email Cc: would be appreciated. Thanks, Andrew
