[K12OSN] Help! 280gigs of one student folder copied recursively into inself
Petre Scheie
petre at maltzen.net
Mon Sep 25 19:18:42 UTC 2006
I ran into a similar problem some years ago: a bug in Mandrake's logrotate caused
certain files & directories in /var/log to be copied and then renamed; but this meant
that each day the previously-archived logs were also copied to new files, which was then
repeated the next day compounding the problem, and so on and so on. After a few weeks,
there would be hundreds of thousands of files. We used to call it the Sorcerer's
Apprentice problem, since it modeled Mickey Mouse's experience with a certain
magical-broom-run-amok.
Anyway, I can tell you from that that running 'rm -rf /directory' CAN take a long time
in a case like this. And if you've got 320GB to plow through, I wouldn't surprise me if
it needed to run over night. If it's all on a separate partition, it would be quicker
to just reformat that partition, but I'm guessing that's not the case. You may just
have to wait it out. Or reinstall. Considering that a stock install only takes about
20 minutes on a modern machine, it would be faster to go that route, assuming you can
afford to lose any data that's on the system.
Petre
Jim Christiansen wrote:
> I don't know how this happenned, but I started an scp job of my student
> homes from the old server across to the new server and walked away.
> Today I have found that the 8 gigs of data has grown to fill the entire
> 320 gig drive, most of it being one student's directory recursively
> copied into itself...
>
> The old server drive is failing but I can't see how this could affect
> the s copy... I did and fschk to get it to reboot before the scp job.
>
> The new server can not seem to rm -rf the offending folder. I have been
> waiting about one hour, and still nothing.
>
> Is there any other way to get this removed?
>
> Thanks, Jim
>
>
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