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I noticed a file 'app.log' in my Applications folder. I delete it but it reappears after a couple of days. What is this and can I get rid of it?

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Open Terminal.app and type less /Applications/app.log. This should display the file content which might contain hints about where it is coming from. – patrix♦ Mar 11 '12 at 14:18
@patrix: +1, don't know why didn't I think of that :-) – binarybob Mar 11 '12 at 21:32

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Probably a bit sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut, but if its happening fairly regularly and you can't figure out what's creating it another way, you could start a terminal prompt and leave the following command running

sudo opensnoop | grep -i app.log

This will monitor for app.log being created and tell you the process that created it (I'm assuming there won't be that many processes creating a file called app.log, but I guess you could narrow it down to /Applications if you wanted to). At least then you'll be armed with the knowledge of what is creating the file and can potentially do something about it.

For example, whilst running the above command, if you type

touch app.log

in another terminal tab or window, the original one running the opensnoop command displays

501  10576 touch          3 app.log              
501  10099 mdworker       6 /Users/binarybob/Documents/app.log
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Great! Just tried it. Thanks for the opensnoop and touch commands. I learnt something new again :) I got the following results: dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 4 (ID 1436: syscall::open:return): invalid user access in action #4 at DIF offset 0 dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 4 (ID 1436: syscall::open:return): invalid user access in action #4 at DIF offset 0 dtrace: error on enabled probe ID 4 (ID 1436: syscall::open:return): invalid user access in action #4 at DIF offset 0 – pechar Mar 11 '12 at 20:05
sorry about the formatting I tries using the mini markdown formatting but id doesn't seem to work in comments :/ – pechar Mar 11 '12 at 20:11
@pechar: Regarding those errors, did you have iTunes running at the same time? Several online forums report that dtrace throws this error if it is. – binarybob Mar 11 '12 at 21:43
No iTunes was not on for sure I only had the browser running. @binarybob – pechar Mar 16 '12 at 20:53
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Ok guys I just found out what is generating this file. Its a log file for exceptions caused by an application called FreeRapid.app which is a download helper like JDownloader. Thanks to both @patrix and @binarybob for the help

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