Simple question with likely a difficult and/or painful solution.

I have a directory that I'm trying to delete, yet it seems to have supernatural powers. If it had only nine lives, it would be gone by now, but nothing I have tried seems to make the directory removable in any means:

belltown:/home # mv dhenders dhenders1
mv: cannot stat `dhenders': Permission denied
belltown:/home # rm -rf dhenders
rm: cannot remove `dhenders': Permission denied
belltown:/home # chattr -i dhenders
chattr: Permission denied while trying to stat dhenders
belltown:/home # stat dhenders
stat: cannot stat `dhenders': Permission denied
belltown:/home # ls -lh dhenders
ls: cannot access dhenders: Permission denied
belltown:/home # ls -lh
ls: cannot access dhenders: Permission denied
total 92K
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? dhenders

Any ideas on how I might rid my system of this beast? Am I destined for a reformat of this partition as my only resolution?

Thanks!!

Dave H

what is the output of lsattr ? may be it is set to append only not just immutable.

Time to run fsck on that partition?

In these cases the path is clear to me:

1.- check attributes, if it doesn't work then
2.- fsck, if that doesn't work then it's time to
3.- use debugfs to delete it (at your own risk)

In any case, more than the fact that the file is there, you should be worried *why* is it there. If it's due to disk corruption you should check your drive and do some backups. If not, it can be a buggy kernel, fs driver or even a rootkit.

I'm still checking into how it was created. It is a pam_mount created user home directory, so I know why it's there, but how it got into the state it is in is of concern. Right now, my bet is on some malfunction in pam_mount.

As for the output of lsattr, it is the same as for chattr.

I did a hard reboot of the machine this morning as the shutdown was stuck trying to unmount that partition. I was able to delete the directory once the machine came back up. Still, I need to know how things got in the state they were in.