Strange case of filesystem corruption?

[Bill Vermillion]

In the last exciting episode of the Mikhail Teterin saga 
on Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 21:37 , Mikhail Teterin as heard to say:

> On Monday 05 September 2005 08:38 pm, Eric Anderson wrote:
> = Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> = > Can this be explained by anything other than a (nasty) bug?

> = > 	% ls -la audio/shorten/files
> = > 	total 0
> = > 	% rmdir audio/shorten/files
> = > 	rmdir: audio/shorten/files: Directory not empty

> = > This is on 5.4-stable from July 21 -- up ever since... Thanks!
> [...]
> =   Can you show permissions on the directories audio, shorten, and files? 

> Well, ls of the directory succeds above, so it can not be the permission
> problem. But here:

> 	% cd audio/shorten
> 	% ls -lds
> 	2 drwxrwxr-x  4 mi  wheel  512 Jul 21 01:13 .
> 	% ls -loas files
> 	total 0
> 	% rmdir files
> 	rmdir: files: Directory not empty

> = Also - what is your securelevel set to

> Default.

> = and have you checked to see if there are processes with any open files
> = in those directories?

> I doubt there are any, and why would that affect anything anyway? Here:

You could check to be sure by running 'lsof'.  That should remove
all doubts.


> 	% mkdir /tmp/q
> 	% touch /tmp/q/meow
> 	% tail -F /tmp/q/meow &
> 	[2] 39947
> 	% rm /tmp/q/meow
> 	% rmdir /tmp/q
> 
> In other words, the directory (/tmp/q) is removable even if a process
> (tail) still has a deleted file (meow) in it opened.
> 
> On Monday 05 September 2005 08:42 pm, Beecher Rintoul wrote:
> = Try  rm -R audio/shorten/files
> 
> Thank you, but I'm afraid, it may succeed in deleting the directory,
> while I try to figure out, what is happening -- the directory is empty
> according to ls, but not empty according to rmdir.

I've seen this fairly recenlty in a 4.x [it's either 9, 10, or 11 -
and I don't remember which server it was on so I can't verify the
version number].

And I'm sorry I don't remember exactly what I did to fix it, as
I tried many ways before I got the right one.

Every now and then almost every Unix system does something that is
almost unfathomable.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com