Zone Identifier

By kamalx | May 24, 2023 | 2 minutes

Windows Annoyances

What is this Zone.Identifier thing getting copied with the files I download or moved around on my computer?

It turns out a lot of people using Windows with an instance of some Linux flavor running inside WSL OR having the ‘Show hidden files" setting checked on their systems have found this annoying thing.

For instance, this question on stackoverflow.

This is what I found about the Zone.Identifier file so far:

From Fileinfo.com
From the above mentioned stackoverflow question:
- ways to get rid of the Zone.Identifier ugliness
- some group policy details about it
- but of course, you cannot run gpedit.msc unless you have Windows Professional (so I am out of luck there)

For Windows Home users using WSL and having trouble with this non-sense, I guess the best solution suggested on the above links is this (on an linux command prompt):

  find /shared/path -type f -name "*:Zone.Identifier" -exec rm -f {} \;

OR (suggested in comments on the SO post):

  find . -name "*Zone.Identifier" -type f -delete

OR (also suggested in comments on the SO post):

  alias rzi="rm -rf **/*Zone.Identifier"

I’ve also found that at least when moving downloaded files into WSL Linux, using the command line from within WSL to cp or mv the files instead of using the Windows Exploder GUI doesn’t copy the trash along with your files.

EDIT [July 10, 2025]: Found the above to be true only for cp command with the following parameters:

cp --no-preserve=all [sauce] [destination]