Hello forums! I've been a long time reader, but some how this is my first post.

Anyways, I did some searching on here, but could not find any thread that covered my question directly, which is understandable because it may seem odd.

Some time ago, I had somehow set permissions on a directory to where it could not be deleted by any user, but all of its contents would be deleted. I know its dumb, but for some reason I cannot remember how I made or chmod'd that directory to behave in that fashion.

Another user accidently deleted it using su - , and I have been trying to recreate it in the way that I had it ever since.

chattr affects the contents of the folder. I havent been able to test sticky bits on it, and I cannot recollect if stickies on parent directories affect contents of folders or no, man pages dont really specify.

I dont have access to this Unix system all the time, so as I said, so I dont get as much time as I would like to play around with it.

Any ideas out there for a scatter brain?

The system in question runs Irix just in case that helps.

But just to recap.. the desired outcome is doing a rm -rf on the directory, getting a permission error as to deleting the directory, but its contents being deleted.

Thanks in advance!

you used chattr instead of chmod. If the directory has the immutable bit set (lsattr <dirname> will show you), just say:

chattr -i <whatever>

I will have to mess with that again, but I was under the impression that chattr -i affects the files and sub directories of directory on which it is applied.

Make this directory owned by root and set permissions to 777
or to 1777 if you want that each user will be able to edit/remove only his own files.

It's exactly settings that /tmp has