[Q] What is the dummy.txt used for?

[nikobearrr]

Hello, I can see I have a dummy.txt in the storage/whisper folder which shows in the grafana when looking at the graphite data source. I was wondering where it came from since I don't produce such metric so I found it here:

carbon/setup.py

Line 61 in 8af0b4f

storage_dirs = [ ('storage/ceres/dummy.txt', []), ('storage/whisper/dummy.txt',[]),

I am interested to know why is that there and why it needed?

[ploxiln]

The only purpose is so that the install process creates those directories. You might see a ".keep" file used for the same purpose by some other software projects on linux systems.

I think that the first step towards getting rid of the need for these "dummy.txt" files is #835

[nikobearrr]

Hi @ploxiln, thanks for the explanation. What was weird was that dummy.txt is it looks like a file, but indeed is a directory. However, your answer answers my question so I am closing this