edmz

Big .xar file in lost+found under MacOSX

I ran BackupLoupe to check the disk space on my Mac, and I realized that there was a 4GB file in the /lost+found directory:

[9:46:40] edmz:/lost+found $ ll
total 8489496
-rw-r--r--  1 root     wheel   4.0G Aug 24  2012 iNode107072005
srw-------  1 eduardo  wheel     0B Aug 27  2012 iNode107754111
srw-------  1 eduardo  wheel     0B Sep 14  2012 iNode109993694
srw-------  1 eduardo  wheel     0B Sep 17  2012 iNode110476913

After running file on file on it, I found out it was a .xar archive, which I had never heard of.

As you might have guessed, it is kind of a tar archive.

And like any .tar file, you can inspect its contents, so thats what I did:

[9:46:43] edmz:/lost+found $ xar -t -f iNode107072005
Distribution
InstallMacOSX.pkg
InstallMacOSX.pkg/Bom
...

As you can tell, it was the remains of the MacOSX installer. Something I can delete without remorse.