I’ve been running Fedora Gnome 37 since it’s release, never any issues. Today I noticed a new, yet unknown file in my home directory called “salt” and it’s only 8 bytes so while it’s not much in terms of size, I did not create it and no application that I know of uses it. I have not installed any new applications recently, so this came as a bit of a shock. Not sure if it’s just some random, harmless little bug from somewhere or if I should be at all concerned about this.
Feel free to let me know if you have any information about seeing this. When I try to open the file it says “Could not display salt, the file is of an unknown type” so I’m wondering if it’s anything nefarious or not or if I should safely delete it. All my applications have been installed from dnf, flatpak, or gnome software, I haven’t used any copr repos or anything out of the ordinary; nothing was ever installed outside of the Fedora repos, Flatpak repos, or RPMFusion repos. My .bash_history file in my home directory shows nothing with ‘salt’ in it either, i’ve never used the word salt for anything on my computer, which is why I find this odd.
Edit: When I open the file ‘salt’ with Text Editor, this is all I see:
----Correction and update----
it was actually the rpm version of Polari that was creating this ‘salt’ file. I don’t know how actively it’s being currently maintained at the moment (there’s over 100 issue trackers now), but I filed a bug report for it here:
