I've got a symbolic link which has no pointer. It is causing a bunch of warnings to pop up in a tar run so I want to remove it. However it has other ideas on this matter:

[root@everglades 3]# ls -l exe
ls: cannot read symbolic link exe: No such file or directory
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 8 16:44 exe
[root@everglades 3]# file exe
exe: unreadable symlink `exe' (No such file or directory)
[root@everglades 3]# rm exe
rm: remove symbolic link `exe'? y
rm: cannot remove `exe': Permission denied
[root@everglades 3]# whoami
root

Any ideas?

Thank you much,
Michael

Try
man setattr
man chattr
HTH

That's a good idea I didn't think to check the attributes. Unfortunately it isn't letting me.

[root@everglades 3]# lsattr exe
lsattr: No such file or directory While reading flags on exe
[root@everglades 3]# lsattr stat
lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on stat

These are all in a proc file system (/var/named/chroot/proc) maybe that has something to do with it?

Have you tried the unlink command ?

No such luck.

[root@everglades 3]# unlink exe
unlink: cannot unlink `exe': Permission denied

It is strange sometimes it just says permission denied, but other times it claims that it doesn't exist:

[root@everglades 3]# touch exe
touch: cannot touch `exe': No such file or directory


Thank you for the input though.

Figured it out, well mostly anyways.

named copies /proc into /var/named/chroot/proc every time it starts. So long as bind is running all of the chroot/proc is immutable. If bind it turned off chroot/proc can be removed. However as soon as bind is back on, there is a new copy there that is again immutable. the exe file that I was trying to remove was a part of one of the pid directories in /proc. I don't fully understand what everything in the pid directories do, but that is what it was.

In my case the solution was to exclude chroot/proc from my tar run (that was my whole problem is it was printing 70 lines of warnings that I didn't want.)

Interesting stuff.
Thank you everyone for your help.