Hidden file from 1969 in R Project?

Question

My R Project has a strange file

that was last edited on Dec 31, 1969. It's called "write-test-" and then a bunch of alphanumerics. The file doesn't show up in my file explorer, even when showing hidden files.

Any ideas on this, and should I worry at all?

Answer 1

When you open an R project, RStudio needs to see if you have write access to the project. It figures this out by writing a small temporary file called write-test-NNNN to the project. If it is successful, then it knows you have write access to the directory, and it removes the file.

So what happened (at some point in the past, probably) was that RStudio was able to write this file, but not able to remove it. This is harmless and you can ignore it if you're not seeing permissions errors in the project. You can safely ignore or delete the file.