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I have a folder where I transfer home videos from a camcorder to. I find two files in this folder that are not videos...

  1. .fuse_hidden0000002c00000001
  2. .fuse_hidden0000002600000002

What are these files, and can they be safely deleted?

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6 Answers 6

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You can safely ignore .fuse_hiddenXXXX files. It means a file was deleted but there is at least one software which is still using it, so it can't be removed permanently.

It will be done automatically when the relevant software stops using the file or exists. Such files are always gone after umount/reboot. This is how Linux and any Unix works but only FUSE exposes these files to the user.

These are likely files that were meant to be deleted but are somehow still in use.UBF

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  • 4
    What created these files?
    – barrypicker
    Jul 10, 2014 at 4:26
  • 15
    You can find out what application has the file open by using the lsof command. lsof /full/path/name/to/file. These files are also related too the ntfs-3g file system.
    – Mitch ♦
    Jul 10, 2014 at 8:31
  • @Mitch: lsof /full/path/name/to/file doesn't show anything for my ` .fuse_hiddenXXXX` file.
    – Tim
    Dec 8, 2014 at 13:57
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    Try lsof /just/the/directory/path instead, that lists everything that has a file open in that directory. Worked for me.
    – dr. Sybren
    Apr 9, 2015 at 9:53
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    After a hard reboot, I found a bunch of these files but lsof revealed that no process was using them. I deleted them without a problem and nothing bad happened.
    – mhernandez
    Jan 22, 2017 at 17:22
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I had such a file, and I was unable to delete the folder it was located in.

Turns out it was a vim swap file. Closing the vim session(in another terminal) solved the issue.

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I had 10GB of fuse files in my Downloads that had a last-modified date of a year and a half ago, so I just deleted them. I ran the lsof command above and it didn't show anything using the file (which would have been really surprising)

I'll uhhh... update this answer I guess if I notice anything went badly from that.

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for me, it was Sonarr that was creating these keepalive files. I have Sonarr running in a docker, with access to the tv-shows on another server. On this server, the files are being created. Stopping the docker container allowed me to remove the files permanently.

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  • Were the files not removed automatically when the docker container was stopped as explained in the accepted answer?
    – Elder Geek
    Jul 23, 2019 at 13:48
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Find out which process is using the hidden .fuseXXX file(s) and stop the process. Then you can remove the file(s).

$ lsof {{dir-name}}/.fuse_hidde... 
COMMAND | PID | USER | FD | TYPE | DEVICE | SIZE/OFF | NODE | NAME
  ....  |<PID>| .... | .. | .... | ...... | ........ | .fuse_hidden 

$ sudo kill <PID>
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These files can be created on Linux based systems including Chromebook after deleting files and the program used before deletion has not released them or a system shut down suddenly for whatever reason before the delete process completed, which can happen in some instances, and in the case of many of them existing in the same folder there is usually a program fault where the program does not release them after finishing with them, as some may know you can do some file manipulation tasks on files such as delete and move while a program is using files, unlike windows Linux can manage this and completes the tasks after the program using them releases them. they are then deleted or moved etc, if you are curious as to what they were and know what file types you stored in the folder, rename them and the extension then open them, if you have the correct extension they will open in the default program.

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