[SOLVED] unable to remove user home directory

daisychick · 11-15-2011, 03:12 PM

CentOS 5.5. attempting to remove a home directory that is currently not assigned to any group or user.

Code:

[root@computer home]# ls -lah
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 14 root       root       4.0K Nov 14 15:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 26 root       root       4.0K Nov  8 14:31 ..
drwx------  4  511        511       4.0K Nov 14 17:11 olduser
drwx------  4  511        511       4.0K Jul  6 10:41 olduser2
drwx------  3  512        512       4.0K Nov 10 16:25 share

[root@computer home]#

Someone previously removed the users but left the mail and home dir.

Code:

[root@computer home]# rm -rf olduser
rm: cannot chdir from `.' to `olduser': Permission denied
[root@computer home]#

I tried rm and rmdir but I can't even cd into the directory. Any suggestions?

Tinkster · 11-15-2011, 03:34 PM

Is that directory local, or mounted from an NFS share?

daisychick · 11-15-2011, 03:48 PM

derpa derp. Nice catch. Totally NFS. How could you tell? From the output or from the behavior?

inoculos · 11-15-2011, 03:50 PM

Forgive me if i'm missing something, Doesn't the number 511 refer to the owner of the file? maybe something like

su
userdel -r 511

daisychick · 11-15-2011, 03:51 PM

I was able to delete them by deleting the user on the NFS share system.

inoculos · 11-15-2011, 03:52 PM

Oh just saw that, sorry

suicidaleggroll · 11-15-2011, 04:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by daisychick

derpa derp. Nice catch. Totally NFS. How could you tell? From the output or from the behavior?

Any time you get a permission denied message when you try to "rm -f" a file while you're root (ignoring drives mounted in read only mode), chances are the file isn't local. NFS is the easiest explanation for why that might be.

Tinkster · 11-15-2011, 06:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by daisychick

derpa derp. Nice catch. Totally NFS. How could you tell? From the output or from the behavior?

Experience ;}

Behaviour - if root can't delete files it's either "not on his box", and root_squash
enabled, or something seriously wrong w/ the underlying fs ...

daisychick · 11-15-2011, 11:13 PM

thanks to all for the input