remove via inode? weird files

pbhj · 10-23-2007, 10:46 AM

Hi I've got a dir of two files I can't delete; "ls -al" gives:

Code:

drwxrwxrwx  2 root root  96 2007-10-23 15:37 m4-1.4.6/

And in the dir:

Code:

root@localhost:/usr/doc/m4-1.4.6# ls -tail
/bin/ls: cannot access NEWS: Permission denied
/bin/ls: cannot access TODO: Permission denied
total 1
104956 drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 712 2007-10-23 16:04 ../
809676 drwxrwxrwx  2 root root  96 2007-10-23 15:37 ./
405575 ??????????  ? ?    ?      ?                ? NEWS
405576 ??????????  ? ?    ?      ?                ? TODO

I've tried rm-ing; mv-ing, then rm-ing; I've tried chmod and chown; I've tried unlink; also ...

Code:

find . -inum 405576 -exec rm -i {} \;

and similar.

Nothing gets through. How can I delete by inode on Slackware or is there some other way?

rg3 · 10-23-2007, 11:10 AM

I'd first verify the filesystem is not damaged and then I would try "rm -i *" (similar to your find) and "mc", or a GUI like "konqueror" or some other if that fails too.

pbhj · 10-23-2007, 04:12 PM

Yeah, have tried rm every which way. Konqueror was able to move the folder to trash but can't then delete it (which is same really as mv then rm having failed). I'm not going to install mc just to try using it's delete unless you can confirm it operates at some other level.

Note that these files are on reiserfs root partition under Slack12.

rworkman · 10-23-2007, 06:58 PM

Good luck. We've got a *very* similar issue on a remote server where a file is unable to be deleted. What you're seeing is almost certainly filesystem corruption - you'll have to do a "reiserfsck --fix-fixable" (which should be pretty safe, but no promises -- we've not been brave enough to do it, so we just moved the file to somewhere on the same filesystem and forgotten it).

For the record, this sort of thing seems to be *way* too common on reiserfs - I know quite a few people with almost identical problems on their systems.