Good Linux question — answering as the UphillTech team:
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams has already explained about the * : It means that the file is executable. A classifier is shown when -F is passed to ls via the command line or otherwise. As for the executable-looking emulator that you can't actually execute, this can happen when the dynamic loader requested by emulator doesn't exist. You can check what kind of file emulator is with the command file emulator , and check what dynamic loader and libraries it needs with ldd emulator (any line showing “not found” is something you need to install). Given the name of the directory and the size of the file,...
Full answer by Gilles 'SO- stop being evil': https://superuser.com/a/178808 (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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