File of Type '.final'?

[John McGaw]

I am finding an insane number for files with the extension '.final' in my
AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\... directory. What are they? They didn't
go away when I cleared cache and there appears to be no pattern to them
besides containing a random-seeming long file name between curly brackets.
Is there any way to clean these up? It isn't that they are taking up space
I don't have but they do take up mucho time when I do a backup of my \User
directory, slowing copies even SSD-to-SSD.

[Paul in Houston, TX]

One Google hit says they are associated with Apple apps.
I don't use W10 but in w7 I would use regedit to find the association.

[John McGaw]

Yeah. I did a Google search and it turned up a bunch of stuff but none of
it made any sense. Like Apple and Final Cut and a few other oddities but
since this is a strictly-Windows world here (well, a couple of Linux boxes
but this isn't one of them) and the files are seemingly Firefox-related.
Oh, and I noticed that some of them are really ancient too. Damn! I hate
mysteries.

Good idea about the regedit search. Don't know if it will actually tell me
anything but it can't hurt.

[John McGaw]

Whatever the files are the problem is worse than I ever though. I wrote
'insane number'. Now I know that Insane Number = 32,953. The sizes range
anywhere from 816KB down to 19 bytes consuming a total of 145MB (size on
disk). The ages range from 11:34 this morning back to April 2017.

Anybody have an clues? Surely I can't be the only one. Or am I...?

[Good Guy]

Could be one of your plugins/Add-Ons/Extensions.

I would just restart FF in Safe Mode and use it for 10 to 15 minutes to see if any more files are created.  Just make sure you record the time so that you know of any new files within that time frame.

--

With over 600 million devices now running Windows 10, customer satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

[John McGaw]

I did even better. I deleted every one of the suckers and started over
again. Sure enough, if I open my normal home page of 35 tabs I get them
popping up again. What I know so far is that they were all compressed using
Snappy and every one of them are snippets of JS. From what I can tell from
looking at the scrunched up code in notepad many seem to be concerned with
web push notifications. I've seen them from an Anchorage newspaper site and
several types from the weather channel site and one was tracked back to the
URL of something called onesignal.com which, by chance?, advertises their
expertise in doing push notification via various channels.

Leaving all of that crap behind is surely an error on somebody's part but
who's?

[Bob Henson]

Sounds like a virus/trojan to me. Have you run all your security programs?
--
Bob
Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England

Forced to choose between two evils - pick the one you haven't tried before!

[Dave Royal]

John McGaw <no.w...@all.dca1.giganews.com> Wrote in message:

I don't know what they are, but can't you exclude them from your
backup? I backup daily with rsync and hundreds of Fx files scroll
by. Occasionally, when they're obviously ephemeral, and it's easy
to do, I add some more excludes.

You obviously need to identify the script that's doing this and
block it. I'd start by identifying the sites(s) and blocking
their scripts.
--
(Remove numerics from my email address)

[Good Guy]

On 11/02/2018 23:34, John McGaw wrote:

Leaving all of that crap behind is surely an error on somebody's part but who's?

Before we conclude that some trojan is doing this, I suggest "Refresh Firefox"  so that you know you are starting from the default settings.  Refresh simply removes all 3rd party Add-ons and all that crap and resets your preferences.  The copy of your old profile is saved on your desktop so it is still available.  After this you'll know what is causing this. 

If you want to know how to refresh Firefox, see this one minute video/screen capture:

<https://youtu.be/a8fqaO5-wys>

[PietB]

John McGaw wrote:
> I am finding an insane number for files with the extension '.final' in my
> AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\... directory. What are they? They didn't
> go away when I cleared cache and there appears to be no pattern to them
> besides containing a random-seeming long file name between curly brackets.

found one such file in my FF profile, in a folder under
https+++ww.youtube.com\cache\morgue
morgue?!? wonder if it's there for dissection.

-p

[John McGaw]

Dissection? Yes, I'd like to cut some things up -- it might relieve my
stress level.

Actually, I think that I've made a bit of progress with this problem
although I won't know for sure for a while. In my FF settings I have been
overriding the cache settings and putting the limit at zero thinking that,
with 32gB of memory, there should be no reason for a well-done program to
store cache on disk for the duration of a session. Well, I've reset that to
default and the innumerable .final files seem to have been diminished and
what is left behind on disk after closing FF are in "C:\Users\John
McGaw\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\g6uiy5bx.default-1433016893854\storage\default\https+++www.adn.com\cache\morgue\92".
I won't pretend to know what all the morgue stuff is about. There are some
3-year-old posts online about accumulations of .final files but claims are
made that the problem(s) is/are fixed. Do we have a regression here?

I will keep an eye on it.

[Jeremy Nicoll]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2018, at 15:23, John McGaw wrote:

> I won't pretend to know what all the morgue stuff is about.

It might be in this sense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgue_file


--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.

[John McGaw]

I can't really exclude from the backup I'm most concerned about at the
moment. I have automatic nightly backups to my server and I have weekly
(data) and nightly (system) backups to a USB3 HD and these could
conceivably be filtered although, since I'm not sitting staring at them as
they run, they don't tend to garner much attention as long as they complete
successfully. The one where I notice is when I do an snapshot to a
removable SSD to keep in my media safe at home. The SSD gets a system
recovery snapshot using the old W7-type backup program and a verbatim copy
of the USER directory. This latter was getting into the .final files and
running through nearly 33k of them was uber slow as the system worked
through many tiny files mixed with a few large ones. No way to conveniently
filter those that I know of. Anyway, I went in and zapped the whole bunch
and am tracking down what is/was causing it in the first place.

[WaltS48]

No clue. I don't have any such files in my profiles.

I also suggest you do a Refresh Firefox.

[Dave Royal]

Now that I'm on my desktop I find I have quite a lot of these too.
david@pan:~/.mozilla> find . -name *.final
reveals 248 lines, all of which have in their path:
/cache/morgue/

A dozen or so sites, including bustimes.org, ft.com, spotify, twitter,
youtube, discourse.mozilla.org ...

I have '/cache/' in my rsync exclude path already which is why I'd not
noticed them. I wonder if they're on Android too?
--
(Remove any numerics from my email address.)

[Luis]

Try this https://www.file-extensions.org

[Dave Royal]

This suggests that these are not deliberately written by websites:
https://github.com/HugoGiraudel/hugogiraudel.com/issues/33

I also have a directory /cache2/doomed/
Perhaps they start there ;)

[Dave Royal]

Dave Royal <da...@dave123royal.com> Wrote in message:

>
> I have '/cache/' in my rsync exclude path already which is why I'd not
> noticed them. I wonder if they're on Android too?
>

Yes, they're in Android. Not so easy to delete, or count, unless
rooted.

All items in
/data/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/mozilla/xxx
xxx/storage/default/https+++SITE/
that have /cache/ contain these morgue...final files
A bug somewhere ....

[John McGaw]

On 2/12/2018 12:08 PM, Luis wrote:
> WaltS48 wrote:
>> On 2/11/2018 5:09 PM, John McGaw wrote:

snip...
> Try this https://www.file-extensions.org

One of the first places I checked. Worse than useless IMHO -- entering the
search term showed two pages of 'results' but not a single one was anywhere
close to what I entered -- completely random assortment as far as I could tell.

[Caver1]

I decided to look and find many of these in my Basilisk profile for
twitter which I neither use nor have accessed.
None in my Firefox profile.

--
Caver1

[Ken Blake]

>close to what I entered -- completely random assortment as far as I could tell.se



I use it all the time. I've never had a problem like what you describe
and I like it a lot.

[WaltS48]

So what did it show for the file extension .final for you?

I couldn't find anything close.

--
Best name ever! Cadet Bone Spurs
Coexist <https://www.coexist.org/>
National Popular Vote <http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/>
Ubuntu 16.04LTS - Unity Desktop

[Jeff Layman]

Catfish found 514 ".final" files in the /morgue folder in my home folder
(Mint 17.3), such as:
.....mozilla/firefox/mwad0hks.default/storage/default/https+++bustimes.org.uk/cache/morgue/100/{eb12389d-f432-4ff2-8156-1503da5fd164}.final

They are taking up only 621k in total, so no great worry - especially as
I'm now using Pale Moon instead of FF, and will eventually delete them.

--

Jeff

[Ken Blake]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 19:56:39 -0500, WaltS48 <sch...@REMOVEverizon.net>
wrote:

>On 2/12/18 3:46 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
>> On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 14:23:03 -0500, John McGaw
>> <no.w...@all.dca1.giganews.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2/12/2018 12:08 PM, Luis wrote:
>>>> WaltS48 wrote:
>>>>> On 2/11/2018 5:09 PM, John McGaw wrote:
>>> snip...
>>>> Try this https://www.file-extensions.org
>>> One of the first places I checked. Worse than useless IMHO -- entering the
>>> search term showed two pages of 'results' but not a single one was anywhere
>>> close to what I entered -- completely random assortment as far as I could tell.se
>>
>>
>> I use it all the time. I've never had a problem like what you describe
>> and I like it a lot.
>
>
>So what did it show for the file extension .final for you?
>
>I couldn't find anything close.

My apologies. What I said was wrong. I misread the URL; it's *not* one
I use. I use filext.com.

[Caver1]

Going to filext.com the only .final it shows is;
"Unknown Apple II File (found on Golden Orchard Apple II CD Rom)"
I doubt that this is what we are looking for.
Thanks.

--
Caver1

[John McGaw]

On 2/12/2018 7:56 PM, WaltS48 wrote:
> On 2/12/18 3:46 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
>> On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 14:23:03 -0500, John McGaw
>> <no.w...@all.dca1.giganews.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2/12/2018 12:08 PM, Luis wrote:
>>>> WaltS48 wrote:
>>>>> On 2/11/2018 5:09 PM, John McGaw wrote:
>>> snip...
>>>> Try this https://www.file-extensions.org
>>> One of the first places I checked. Worse than useless IMHO -- entering the
>>> search term showed two pages of 'results' but not a single one was anywhere
>>> close to what I entered -- completely random assortment as far as I
>>> could tell.se
>>
>>
>> I use it all the time. I've never had a problem like what you describe
>> and I like it a lot.
>
>
> So what did it show for the file extension .final for you?
>
> I couldn't find anything close.
>

Well, here is a short snippet of two full pages of 'matching results' the
site returns: (formatting did not carry over well)

3gp Multimedia files for wireless networks
big Electronic Arts game resource package
dib file icon file extension dib Device-Independent bitmap graphics
flv file icon file extension flv Flash video
ini file icon file extension ini Text configuration data
file extension lqm LG QuickMemo note
max file icon file extension max 3ds Max (3D Studio MAX) scene
mov file icon file extension mov Apple QuickTime digital video

nowhere in the two pages did an extension of 'final' show up.