I just ran into some very bizarre behavior trying to read an smbfs mounted NTFS directory. A number of files were "invisible" to ls, but were actually there. Others were unaffected. It is not a permissions issue, nor are these hidden files. They are outwardly no different than the ones that can be seen. The file names are not too long (shorter in fact than some of those that can be seen). They are text files.

There are about 300-400 files in this directory on a publically shared network server (NTFS) - all text files of a few hundred Kb each. On a windows machine I can see them all, open them, etc. There are no special attributes set on these files. I created them from my Gentoo box and moved them to this location using the smbfs mount. I've had this directory mounted for months and never had any problem before this.

Today I went looking for a set of files and they weren't there - as far as the Gentoo smbfs mount is concerned. But they are still there on the windows side.

To try to debug this, I created a new directory on the network drive and copied the contents of the borked one into it - Icould see all the files at that point from the Gentoo box. But when I deleted the old directory and renamed the new one back to the old one, suddenly the same subset of files were invisible again. I even checked with ls -a, but its just like they don't exist.

I also tried regenerating the files. Same result.

I have no control over the directory name - it has to be named what it is for compatibility with program software maintained by others. - otherwise I'd just work out of a different one.

Oh - and a Redhat 9.0 system mounting this drive the same way can see all the files just fine. Here is the /etc/fstab mount line I use:

//136.200.0.183/groups /home/groups smbfs \
credentials=/.smbfscred,uid=1002,gid=100 0 0

This is totally bizarre. Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

Thanks.
-Jeff