File I cannot delete

Message

george · Post by **george** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 5:15 pm

Having had problems on a partition, I'm now left with what should be a file which has an obviously corrupted directory entry that I cannot delete - and I have to.

It should be:

Code: Select all

-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root

but it shows as:

Code: Select all

d--S------ 2 root 512

Running as root, I'm not allowed to chown, chmod, rm , rmdir or unlink it.

I've booted from CD and run fsck (a few times) but it's happy. I've tried lsattr but it shows nothing. It's an ext3 filesystem.

Can anyone offer me any other suggestions please.

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 5:41 pm

The best advice for these sorts of problems tends to be to rsync -ax everything somewhere else, make a new filesystem, and rsync -a everything back.

george · Post by **george** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 6:49 pm

I must admit I was hoping for something a little less drastic but if I don't get any suggestions or find anything myself, I think I'll have to take the pain in the morning.

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:01 pm

Well at least let the initial -ax run overnight, if you have the space somewhere : )

Post by **toralf** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:15 pm

why rsync ? "tar -cvjpf ./foo.tbz2 ./foo" or "cp -ax foo bar" should do the trick.

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 11:39 pm

toralf wrote:why rsync ? "tar -cvjpf ./foo.tbz2 ./foo" or "cp -ax foo bar" should do the trick.

filesize limitations of tar, filesize limitations of bzip2, unreliableness of cp, and the fact that rsync totally kicks ass

george · Post by **george** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 10:52 am

I avoided recreating the partition by moving the parent directory out of the way and then restoring it in the right place. Now I've just got 72k of junk which I can ignore.

If anyone does have any suggestions for getting rid of it I would still appreciate it as part of my ongoing education.