While troubleshooting some issues on a distributed GlusterFS cluster, I came across the presence of a bunch of odd zero-byte files with empty permissions on the bricks. 132504 1 ---------T 2 1000 1000 0 Nov 28 02:09 /data/gluster/tank/brick-xxxxxxxx/brick/example/file.txt I had known they were there previously, but since the bricks were composed of ZFS zpools, there was very little danger of running out of inodes or anything, so I had let them be.