How to kill a dir?

[jdow]

From: "Felipe Alfaro Solana" <felipe_alfaro at linuxmail.org>

> On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 19:09, WipeOut wrote:
> > I have a dir that I can't seem to delete and is giving strange errors..
> >
> > [root at dev02 i386]# ls
> > ls: ??*?: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character
> > test
> > [root at dev02 i386]# rm -rf test
> > rm: cannot remove directory `test': Directory not empty
> > [root at dev02 i386]# cd test
> > [root at dev02 test]# ls
> > ls: : No such file or directory
> >
> > Anyone got any super commands for getting rid of a directory that just
> > will not go?
>
> If everything else fails, I recommend using "fsck" to checl the
> filesystem integrity.

That is a good suggestion.

I've seen the two effects he mentions before. The "test" effect was
created by an application that figured out how to force a hard link
of a subdirectory back to its parent a couple parents up the chain.
It was ugly. However, I do not believe this is necessarily his effect.

I had an old Adaptec 2900 series SCSI controller. (Well, I still have
it but with repaired firmware.) As it turns out this controller did
not live at all well with IDE drives in the same system. The effect
was a slow decay of the whole system as the "one bit per megabyte or
so" error rate on the IDE bus (!) ate into the system, directory
entries as well as file entries. I got some directories with names
such as are cited above. They were unremovable. And the system was
filled with lost and corrupted data as well as directories with
really strange names. It required new firmware in the controller and
a system rebuild to recover. Note that there is absolutely nothing
that Linux OS software can do to fix broken hardware in this sort of
situation.

I suspect this gentleman has a system hardware problem of some serious
magnitude. He'd be well advised to save as much data as he can, twice
or three times, and then attack getting the hardware more stable. (These
days I'd suspect a highly overclocked system, that he may not even
think is overclocked at all.)

{^_^}