Hi everyone!

I'm running a small mail server. It has installed the slackware distro + qmail+spamassassin + clamav.
It's been a few days that I can't erase the spam messages from the folder they are stored.
When I 'm trying to see the contents of my spam directory with the ls command I take an output of many lines who look like this:

/usr/bin/ls: 'the_name_of_a_spam_message1' : No such file or directory
/usr/bin/ls: 'the_name_of_a_spam_message2' : No such file or directory
.
.
.

The du command shows that the directory is 25GB large but it also outputs:

du: cannot access 'the_names_of_a_spam_messages' : No such file or directory
.
.
.
and when I' trying to remove a message :

rm: cannot remove 'the_name_of_a_spam_message1': No such file or directory

Ive tried to change the ownership of these files to root
but the chown command outputs

chown: cannot access 'the_names_of_a_spam_messages' : No such file or directory

Any ideas??Is there a way to remove these files and free my precious diskspace??

THANX in advance to anyone that can give a solution!

this forum rules!

have you tried:
the -f or --force flag ignores non-existent files

...and if that doesn't work:

/usr/bin/ls: 'the_name_of_a_spam_message1' : No such file or directory
I thought it was "/bin/ls"?

Are you executing all commands as root account user?
Is the partition that holds the spam directory mounted readwrite?
What is the partitions' filesystem (Ext, Reiser, etc, etc)?
What are the access rights and ownership of the spam directory itself (stat or ls -d)?
What are the access rights and ownership of the spam files (find /the/spam/dir -ls)?
Any extended attributes set (lsattr)?
Is any process holding the files open (lsof -w -n +/the/spam/dir)?

And please post *exact* lines of commands and results if you're gonna post any.

Thanx for the replies!

1.Unfortunately, it seems that the rm -f does nothing .

When I execute it (for example 'rm -f filename1') I see nothing on the screen as if everything went ok.
But after that the 'ls' command still gives me:
/usr/bin/ls: 'filename1' : No such file or directory

2.I've found the server as it is from anotherperson and for a reason that I don't know he/she decided to put the majority of the commands into /usr/bin instead of /bin

3. Yes I'm running the commands as root and the partition is mounted readwrite. (in fact everything worked fine 2 weeks ago. then I got seek and I wasn't able to check the server for 10 days and then oops the problem was there...)

4. My mtab file looks like this (for the hdc6 where home is mounted):
/dev/hdc6 /home reiserfs rw,noatime,nodiratime,notail 0 0

5.The stat command for the spam directory gives me :
File: `new'
Size: 3155224 Blocks: 6162 IO Block: 131072 directory
Device: 1606h/5638d Inode: 294 Links: 2
Access: (0700/drwx------) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 501/services)
Access: 2006-10-12 22:12:50.000000000 +0300
Modify: 2007-02-09 14:13:53.000000000 +0200
Change: 2007-02-09 14:13:53.000000000 +0200

6. The "find /myspamdirectory -ls" outputs:

294 3081 drwx------ 2 root services 3155224 Feb 9 14:13 new

but then it stucks and the Ctrl+C command is needed to go on.

7.the lsattr command gives me

------------- ./new
I thing this means that no extended attributes are set into this directories. The same happens for the files in that directory.

8. Finally the lsof -w -n +/the/spam/dir command gives no output. I suppose that this means that no service is holding this directory.


Another thing that I've pointed out is that the du -h /myspamdirectory doesn't work: the computer stucks and a Ctrl+C is needed again. (sometimes the ls stucks too and then I take ls: memory exhausted...)

A possibly stupid idea that came into my head: is there any possibility that spamassassin who is responsible for writing the files in there gave to many different files the same name and this completely messes up the system?

Appart from all that a final point that gave me a nervous breakdown today: the 'tmp' folder in the Mailbox where the spam messages are stored is not acessible anymore. In fact all the related commands result to a 'permission denied'.
Yesterday (and I'm really sure about that) I was in there and I was comparing the messages behaviour to that of the other problematic folder(and of course I'sure I didn't touch the permissions....).

OK. Only things come to mind are checking syslogs for clues or else it might be a Reiser-centric problem. Some people swear Reiser is "safe", performant and otherwise generally OK but I've never seen the spontaneous and blocking errors it gives in say Ext.*... Maybe run some Reiserfs checks first to validate its integrity.

Know it sounds silly but you don't have any bad characters in there (/, \ or \0 namely). If so you can delete them using inode numbers...

ok I will try to run reiserfsck so as to see what's happening.
(i will wait until a moment that my server isn't busy and i'll try to make a backup of the hd before running this...)
i'll post the results here...
thanx a lot unSpawn!

well in fact thanx a lot everyone!!!!))

just checked that : I can't delete them with the inode number and the primary reason is that I can't find the inode numbers of these files.
All the related commands refuse to work...

There is a "feature" to Linux.

If you delete a file that some other application has locked, it will appear to delete, but not really. The directory entries will vanish and you'll get the symptoms you describe. However, the app that had the lock on that file can and will continue to write to it.

Try doing an lsof to see who is holding that file open (your mail server perhaps?). When you find the culprit, shut down that service so that the file gets closed, which should cause it to vanish.

Yeah I did try the lsof.
But lsof can't see these strange files...

lsof: status error on filename: No such file or directory

no, you do an lsof on all open files and look to see if yours is there anyplace.

lsof | grep myfile

If you specify the file then lsof checks the directory structure first. Well, we already know your file has been removed from the directory structure.

If it really is about deleted files it might be easier to spot with "lsof|grep '(del' ".
It does explain the "No such file or directory" but it doesn't explain commands getting stuck.

I cannot tell you exactly why it happens, but I have seen this kind of thing (commands getting stuck) when there is a file in the directory that has been deleted (but "not really") and you do anything that might access that file.

I first encountered this and posted about it regarding the .xsession-errors file and kplayer. Posted last summer or fall; it's here someplace but I haven't done a search to find the thread.

I cannot tell you exactly why it happens, but I have seen this kind of thing (commands getting stuck) when there is a file in the directory that has been deleted (but "not really") and you do anything that might access that file.
No, I'm not asking you to explain, it's just that I find it fascinating. I've been in some situations too where I didn't even have rights as root user: all rights gone, recursively. Luckily there's debugfs. (BTW your thread is http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=435420 but I see no relation to this one, could be me.)