Query about parasitic firefox file

[Colin Law]

On 7 March 2018 at 09:08, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> In the last 12 hours, 1.4GB of my home directory free space
> disappeared, rendering the system unusable.
>
> After having progressively shut the system down, before it crashed,
> and, rebooting the system, with the free space still having been
> disappeared, in searching for unexplained things, I found in the path
> /home/me/.mozilla/firefox/<mixedstring>.default-<numericstring>/
> the file places.sqlite-wal with Type "unknown" and size 1.5GB and Date
> Modified being a couple of hours ago.
>
> Does anyone know what is this file, what does it contain, and, can I
> safely delete it without it causing further harm?

This is an explanation of what it is all about
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7fbh5m/placessqlitewal_was_89gb_and_prevented_firefox/
so yes you can delete it. If you regularly get the problem suspect a
browser addon.

I imagine google would have found that for you, or something similar,
had you googled for sqlite-wal firefox

Colin