Extraneous directories created at root of Ubuntu file system

[IDisposable]

Windows Version

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22635.3858]

WSL Version

WSL version: 2.2.4.0

Are you using WSL 1 or WSL 2?

• WSL 2
• WSL 1

Kernel Version

5.15.153.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2

Distro Version

Ubuntu 22.04

Other Software

WSL version: 2.2.4.0
Kernel version: 5.15.153.1-2
WSLg version: 1.0.61
MSRDC version: 1.2.5326
Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
DXCore version: 10.0.26091.1-240325-1447.ge-release
Windows version: 10.0.22635.3858

Repro Steps

After a long time running this Ubuntu machine, I had need to look in the filesystem root cd / and there are a bunch of extra directories wsl* which I don't seem to have rights to... was wondering where they came from. The first one has a creation data of 2023-04-07 and the most recent one is 2023-11-10 and I can find no reference to them anywhere (and lacking rights, can't see what's in them to diagnose)

I do NOT know if WSL or Ubuntu or something else is creating these, but have no idea how to dig into that and they all start with wsl which is suspicious.

Expected Behavior

Not seeing randomly named directories (starting with wsl) created at my filesystem root.

Actual Behavior

Directories are appearing with "random" names starting with wsl

Diagnostic Logs

No response

[github-actions]

Logs are required for review from WSL team

If this a feature request, please reply with '/feature'. If this is a question, reply with '/question'.
Otherwise please attach logs by following the instructions below, your issue will not be reviewed unless they are added. These logs will help us understand what is going on in your machine.

How to collect WSL logs

Download and execute collect-wsl-logs.ps1 in an administrative powershell prompt:

Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/WSL/master/diagnostics/collect-wsl-logs.ps1" -OutFile collect-wsl-logs.ps1
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
.\collect-wsl-logs.ps1

The scipt will output the path of the log file once done.

Once completed please upload the output files to this Github issue.

Click here for more info on logging
If you choose to email these logs instead of attaching to the bug, please send them to [email protected] with the number of the github issue in the subject, and in the message a link to your comment in the github issue and reply with '/emailed-logs'.

View similar issues

Please view the issues below to see if they solve your problem, and if the issue describes your problem please consider closing this one and thumbs upping the other issue to help us prioritize it!

Closed similar issues:

• Multiple directories in / looking like wslRaNDoM (#7152), similarity score: 0.87
• There are always empty folders like wslxxx in my wsl root directory. (#10690), similarity score: 0.81
• Creating nested directories from Windows in WSL file system creates 'limbo' directories (#5279), similarity score: 0.71
• WSL2 rootfs directory disappeared (#6221), similarity score: 0.70

Note: You can give me feedback by thumbs upping or thumbs downing this comment.

[IDisposable]

Following advice in linked issues, I did

sudo -s
cd /
rmdir wsl*

Will report if they come back

[IDisposable]

WslLogs-2024-07-03_18-01-29.zip
Not that I could reproduce at will, but here's the logs

[github-actions]

The log file doesn't contain any WSL traces. Please make sure that you reproduced the issue while the log collection was running.

Diagnostic information

Detected appx version: 2.2.4.0
Found no WSL traces in the logs

[howardsun-dev]

Happening for me as wel

[tkuschel]

I have the same issue with WSL2, Debian. But not within WSL2, Arch Linux.
In Debian, the /wsl?????? folders are created since 2023-01-05; still creates folders starting with "wsl" in root directory.

[ccneko]

Found the same issue after a year or so in my WSL2 (Ubuntu) in Windows 11.
I was checking if these folders can be safely deleted and came here.
There seems to be no official answers. All the relevant issues here are pointing to each other and automatically closed.

• Multiple directories in / looking like wslRaNDoM  #7152
• There are always empty folders like wslxxx in my wsl root directory. #10690
  I will try to delete the folders and report here if specific errors arise.

[IDisposable]

After seeing someone else having this happen again, I checked and there we 10 new ones...