Dear all
I am facing a basic problem in RHEL 5.2. Some of files in a mounted showing ? in place of owner and group owner.
root# find /data/abc -nouser
listing those files.
How to delete those files because
root# find /data/abc -nouser -exec rm -rf {} \;
showing error access is denied

If root is unable to delete the files, they may be on a partition that is mounted read-only or be on read-only media.

Try to remount the partition as read-write.

Some memory sticks have a slide switch to "lock" the contents (making the stick read-only).

Thanks for reply
No, partition is mounted in read/write mode. But some files showing ? in place of inode, owner and group owner. Trying to delete those files gives access denied message.

The inode number is showing as ?

Have you tried running fsck on the filesystem (this will need to be unmounted first)?

I suppose 'ls -n' doesn't show a number for the uid and gid, right?

thanks for respone
ls -n also showing ? in place of uid and gid. fsck may solve problem but i can't unmount it at this time. Is there any alternate way without applying fsck?
I am also investigating reason for such problem in ext3 file system. It would be great help if someone point me in right direction.

Have you tried changing the owner to root? Can you change the permissions at all with "chmod"?

Since "ls" tries to find the owner and group in the files "/etc/passwd" and "/etc/group" it might show a ? when it can't find the ID number in the files. I thought that it just displayed the number instead. I'm assuming permission problems (lack of read access) for "/etc/passwd" and "/etc/group" would affect the listing of all files and not just some files.

I recommend doing "fsck" soon because a file system problem won't get better by itself, and might get worse. It's better to be sure as soon as possible and avoid losing other more important files.

You have been advised to run fsck on that partition. This is good advice because your filesystem is almost certainly corrupted.

The longer you continue to use that filesystem, the worse the errors will become, until the filesystem is unreadable.

So, please follow the advice you have been given.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for advice, i will do fsck and report you accordingly. At the same time i removed the folder that hold those files (since all those files was in one folder only), Now there are no such files in my system. So does fsck require immediately ?

Thanks

Stop deleting files. Stop trying to fix it. You may be making things seriously worse. Unmount the filesystem and run fsck.

Thanks
I fixed problem using fsck. fsck showed error 'inodes that were part of corrupted orphaned linked list' found.

Thnks again fsck is right option in this situation.