why is there a . before some file names?

Chas thought I might need to be here with my question. I recently found a file directly under C:\Program Files called .autorun and in one of the logs thrown out by runkeys, I found an entry .owner
Why is there a . before these names? When I first saw it I thought it was malware.
abri

 

Personnaly i nerver saw those kind of extension files but autorun.exe is when you insert a cd it will start right away when your put in your cd drive.....

Did you check with google ???

 

I don't know how to get Google to do a search that will take the . into consideration, otherwise I would have looked it up that way
abri

 

HI!
Clark is right...those are NOT 'normal' file extensions.
I searched several extensive libraries and did not find them listed.
Have you tried looking at thier 'properties'?
Reading them in Notepad?
Maybe you could try renaming them...( .autorun to autorun.txt-.owner to owner.txt) and see what happens. Are they 'readable'?
They are definately NOT system files and would probably not cause any problems if they got deleted, but I would try to 'read' them first.

Here are 3 of the libraries I searched:

http://www.file-ext.com/o.html

http://whatis.techtarget.com/file-extension-list-A/0,289933,sid9,00.html

http://www.fileinfo.net/

Here is a place you can upload a 'suspicious' file to have it analyzed:

http://virusscan.jotti.org/

 

Thanks!
I deleted the .autorun with no apparent problems, but later pulled it back out of the trash so I could run ccleaner without losing it.
I'm more reluctant to delete the file
{972ce4c6-7308-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}
which I found under c:\Programme\Extensions
because it looks like a registry entry. Since they came into the computer within a minute of each other, I expect they are related.
I will try the jotti.org
When I tried copying this registry-looking entry, I couldn't get it to paste into Google. Is that normal for registry entries? I thought you could paste anything into Google. Also, I had thought file extensions were what came at the end of the file, like .exe or .doc Is it also a file extension if it comes at the beginning of the file?
abri

 

a '.' before a file name indicates a Hidden file, at least in Unix. I'm fairly certain that that followed through to DOS (stripped down version of unix) and from there, into Windows.

feel free to scan the files, but my guess is that you have 'view hidden files' and 'view protected operating system files' enabled.

 

I tried to rename .autoreg to .autoreg.txt and when I did, it said (translated from German) "put a name in". Then I took the . out and changed it to autoreg.txt which turned out to be a .txt file with nothing in it. When I tried to put it back to .autoreg, I couldn't. I got the same error message "put a name in". It didn't seem able to read there was anything in there. So now it's missing. oh dear!
both of the mysterious files have zero bytes, so I wondered why they would exist at all, however, maybe after reboot, I will know if something is not working anymore.
abri

 

I did one last thing. I ran a search for anything that was changed or put on the computer at the exact same time. I found 15 entries, all with the same date and time to the minute, all with 0 bytes. They are all under C:\Programme and all of them put in in the one minute have zero bytes. One is a folder called res which contains four subfolders dtd, entity Tables, fonts, html. The others are directly under C:\Programme and are called defaults, extensions, chrome, components, greprefs, plugins, uninstall, autoconfig, pref, and {972ce4c6-7308-... etc)

Anything here ring any bells? Too weird. What are zero bytes good for?
Thanks.
abri

 

Hi again,

Looks like Firefox...???

 

I think you're right with firefox. I hope I didn't kill anything when I took the . out of autoreg. Guess time will tell. lol
thanks
abri