I made a mistake when trying to find and mv Zone.Identifier files and now have an unknown and unmoveable file that is just a relative pathway

Question

(using WSL)

I seem to have made a foolish error when finding and moving .Zone.Identifier files.

I ran the command:

find . -name *:Zone.Identifier -exec mv '{}' "\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\home\gildenstern1\Coding-Prgramming\100Devs\100Devs\archive" ';'

As you can see I copied a path and used that (which I am presuming is the problem). However, what seems to have happened is the zone identifiers are gone but are not in the selected directory and instead I have a file whose name and file type is just the pathway. It is showing as 0kb but if i try to move it, i am told the file size is too large to move. I deleted it and on restarting my computer: Linux was gone!

I still had access to the Ubuntu shell and could find directories under my user name but could not find the ubuntu directory or wsl.local host etc and VSCode could not connect to WSL.

I tried re-installing WSL through powershell but after doing so I was told there was already an instance with that name. So, i tried re-starting and, thankfully, everything is back.

However, that deleted file has also been returned and I am back to square one. It felt as if deleting that file deleted everything within the pathway? I do not understand what has happened and as this directory is part of a repo I don't really want an unknown apparently all-consuming file inside... Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Perhaps of note: after deleting the file I attempted to push to GitHub and was met with the error:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname git: Name or service not known fatal: Could not read from remote repository