Hi guys
For those of you who may know..
What are these hs_err_pid log that are 'piling-up' in the home folder ? (see image)
What I gathered on the web tells me it is related to some Java behavior.
Safe to delete ? Action to be initiated ? Have no idea.
Any contribution welcome
W
Yes, these log files appear to be crash dumps for applications that run under the Java HotSpot(tm) Runtime Environment. (hs, as seen in hs_err_, means HotSpot.) The pid part refers to the process ID of the Java Runtime Environment at the time it crashed.
But are the files safe to delete? It depends. Yes, you may delete them and nothing will break; they are just crash dumps. However, if I were you, I'd be rather concerned about the pile-up of crash dumps; if there's a crash dump log, then there must have been a program crash, and if there was a program crash, then something didn't go as planned. What kinds of buggy Java applications have you been running during June / July 2021 anyway? Do you recall any Java applications crashing recently? (You may want to peek inside a few of the files and see if you recognize what application crashed.)
I'd hate to be a doom-sayer, but if you can't explain these crashes, then you may well have unauthorized software on your computer (a.k.a malware) -- in this day and age it sounds strange to have malware written in Java, but at one time it was actually common (this was when Java was a common language used on the Web). Or, hopefully, you can explain what happened. If you can account for the crashes, then you can delete the files. That's all I have to say for now.
I look forward to hearing more about this issue.
Thanks Not an expert, but I'll dig out further.
If another reason, then why the log is referring to PDFStudio multiples times ?
By looking through the logs, it seems (to me...) associated with the opening of Docusign documents. I may be wrong.
Got Firefox and LibreOffice that had to close and re-start but only once since May.
p.s. if malware, ClamTK should take care of it...no?
Well, if you remember opening a lot of documents using PDFStudio (or opening one document a lot of times), then I guess it's not malware. I suppose you can safely delete them.
Keep in mind that novel malware is usually not caught by virus scanners like ClamAV / ClamTK / whatever user interface to ClamAV you have. ClamAV only detects known malware -- though, honestly, it's unlikely you have malware anyway since this is a properly-secured Linux system, I assume.
My guess (just my guess)
I had to open a few PDFs that were Docusign documents. Which is Java driven...
So I guess the web interface was looking for some Acrobat markers - but with no answer. Hence the error messages triggered by PDF Studio.
But I am just speculating, here.
W
Well, if you can explain it, then as I said: It's probably not malware. I didn't mean to shake you up like that. You can go ahead and delete them. Thanks for checking with us first!
