[K12OSN] Help! 280gigs of one student folder copied recursively into inself

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 12:27 -0600, 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...

Scp -r follows symlinks instead of duplicating them so it is possible
to get in a recursive loop.  'rsync -a' is safer, or tar | tar.

> 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?

It is probably working and just has a long way to go.  If you do
a df in another window you should see the free space growing.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com