(Edit: Dang typo - mountig = mounting)

I have a unix system that has the root directory mounted read only.

/dev/wd0f / ufs ro 1 1

I need to delete a directory /test, but 'rm -rf /test' gives me messages on each file that it's a read-only file system.

Can I simply umount /dev/wd0f ?

Delete that directory.

And then mount /dev/wdof?

Or, I suppose with the mount command I'll need to respecify the ro.
The problem is that the system doesn't have man pages installed and I'm entering this thread from a windows machine.

Thanks for any insight.

you can remount it rw like this:

mount -o remount -o rw {partition}

you can remount ro again by replacing rw with ro. There are online man pages at linuxqestions.org:
http://man.linuxquestions.org/
I think it should be better advertised.

Thanks for the quick response.

I tried that command, " mount -o remount -o rw / " and got:

mount: -o remount: option not supported

The machine is a nokia firewall with IPSO 3.6 .

Any more ideas?

Thanks!

I discovered "mount -u / "

That seems to do it.

Although, I don't yet know how to undo that.

if the option isn't supported. I'm pretty sure you cannot umount it while it's running - you might give it a try.

Can you mount the partition to some other unix system? If you can do that, you could mount it rw there and make the changes.

Looks like we posted at about the same time there.

Do you know about the " mount -u / " command. I used this and was able to delete the unneeded directories.

However, I'm pretty sure I'll need to undo the effect of the -u thing.

Also, the machine is not connected to the network at the moment. It will be reinserted once it is upgraded.

I suppose I could just reboot.

Thanks...

I don't see a -u option in my man pages. I guess there are differences between linux and unix. Well, it's good that it worked.