It shouldn't. What conf* files do you see?
conf23880 conf23880.dir conf23880.file
Where "conf23880.dir" is an empty directory, "conf238800.file" is a file containing only a newline and "conf23880" symlinks to "conf23880.file".
Having looked into it, it seems that these files are usually deleted by 'make depend' and are only temp files (I probably stopped "make depend" with ^C to generate them).
The pattern is broken anyway since it also catches "configure", etc.
Peter