Duplicate .Private symlink appears in Home

[J. Snow]

I'm an Ubuntu 17.10 user. I noticed that when I list the contents of my home there are two duplicate .Private symlinks.

~$ ls -lhai /home/USERNAME
# THE LIST OF MY FILES GOES HERE AND THEN
13371354 lrwxrwxrwx 1 USERNAME USERNAME 35 Nov 6 00:28 .Private -> /home/.ecryptfs/USERNAME/.Private
13371354 lrwxrwxrwx 1 USERNAME USERNAME 35 Nov 6 00:28 .Private -> /home/.ecryptfs/USERNAME/.Private

I tried rm, unlink, mv and any other possible command to get rid of the file but any such operation leads to "corrupting" the file:

~$ ls -lhai /home/USERNAME
# THE LIST OF MY FILES GOES HERE AND THEN
? l????????? ? ? ? ? ? .Private

After that any additional try to remove the file leads to:
$ rm .Private
rm: cannot remove '.Private': No such file or directory

Of course with ls we can still see it there. Finally if we setup a symlink with the same name the file starts appearing again twice.

I don't face any other problems with the system other than that but I'm afraid that this is a sign of corruption of the fs. Any thoughts/tips?

Thanks!
Johnny

[Jason Xing (wlxing)]

You don't need to remove those files because eCryptfs is used to encrypt your data. You chose "encrypted home directory" option when installing Ubuntu, right? That's the reason why those files exist.