You know, I noticed this a while back – and without thinking further assumed the clever naming referred specifically to those *named* files, rather than the other files in that directory... Sort of a meta-instruction.

Pretty silly really considering they're all 1k but there you go :)

What, you didn't know? I think that this is excellent approach for warnings
to not delete files or these files are copyrighted or something else that could get you in trouble if you did.

<< ... assumed the clever naming referred specifically to those *named* files ... >>

That's what I thought when I saw that at first. Perhaps they should be more specific – i.e. "the files in this folder" rather than "these files".

This is pretty old.. saw this first in the p2p software Soulseek..!! saw it bout 3-4 years back!!

Yeah, it's there from the day 1 of GDS, around 20050227.

Looks like the old ftp messages that sysops would use back in the day...I still use techniques like this to move items to the top of my directory structure so I don't have to hunt and peck for oft used directories.