as root can not delete files in users home
 

i'm using slak12

a few days ago this box has been really lagging logged in as joe.
i'm figuring maybe theres a lot a junk in joe's home.

so as root i goto /home/joe and do a clean up(since logged in as joe it's totaly lagged).

problem:
logged in as root using konqueror
selected file(s) "move to trash" i get
in shell:

rm -f [any file] or any try with rm "permission denied"
chown root:root * only gives "permission denied"

cant delete /home/joe

theres 8 files i never noticed before there
.serverauth.1234

i'm stumped. right now i'd like to just dump the entire /home/joe dir!
all files there that are worth anything are symlinked to another drive or network.

anyone see this before oir can help me dump this dir?


thanks

Rights issues
 

Can you switch to single user mode and try rm -rf /home/joe?
"telinit 1"

try using "shred -fu /home/joe"

I practically never use the trash. However you had the same problem in the shell. What are the permissions of files in /home/joe, as well as the directories /home and /home/joe. Look with "getattr", "getfattr" and "lasttr" as well. If a file has the immutable bit set, even root can't delete files. If you are running selinux or apparmor, a misconfiguration could cause problems as well.

Also, look how the filesystem is mounted. If there was a problem with the filesystem, that partition might be mounted readonly.

As far as the server lagging, does top show anything interesting? If /home isn't on it's own partition, /var and /tmp might be full. I had a problem with YaST previously on my laptop. The /var/tmp directory was filling up with thousands of temporary directories, exceeding the inode limit.