I just happened to type journalctl -e in my terminal for an unrelated reason and see variations of the following line being constantly added over and over, and I have no idea why, or what is actually looking for this mysterious file:
Feb 17 23:41:55 manjaro gnome-shell[8381]: tail: cannot open '/home/brendan/envoy.csv' for reading: No such file or directory
Feb 17 23:42:00 manjaro gnome-shell[8390]: tail: cannot open '/home/brendan/envoy.csv' for reading: No such file or directory
Feb 17 23:42:05 manjaro gnome-shell[8398]: tail: cannot open '/home/brendan/envoy.csv' for reading: No such file or directory
Feb 17 23:42:10 manjaro gnome-shell[8408]: tail: cannot open '/home/brendan/envoy.csv' for reading: No such file or directory
Feb 17 23:42:15 manjaro gnome-shell[8424]: tail: cannot open '/home/brendan/envoy.csv' for reading: No such file or directory
There is no “brendan” user account on my laptop, I don’t know anyone named Brendan, and I wonder if maybe it is some Gnome Shell developer or something.
You could search for that command (tail) somewhere in the files in your ~/.config folder
or in your shell configuration files … search for the appearance of that word (tail) - or for the appearance of that path (/home/brendan)
It’s more than likely some change you have made - knowingly or not.
… or search /etc - it appears to be a regular event (a timer, perhaps) - every 5 seconds
I could not tell you a command to do this - some combination of “find” and “grep” would probably work.
I’d use the tool I almost always use: the “mc” terminal file manager.
It has got such an easy to use search function - to search each file below a certain path for the occurrence of a certain phrase.
(Menu → Command → Find file …)
It seemed to stem from me temporarily using a fork of the Gnome Shell system monitor extension, while waiting for the upstream version to be updated. Now that I have switched back to upstream, the extension is no longer looking for that file.