what does "rm //" delete?

[Mark Ovens]

Oliver Fuchs wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I had a directory which contained the following:
> 
> ls showed me simple this: "?" with 0 bytes
> ls -axl showed me nothing
> 
> So I tried to delete the directory but could not succeed with "rm -R"
> because the "directory is not empty". I changed to the directory and tried
> to delete everything inside with "rm *" but also did not succeed. It seemed
> that the file had no name. So than I did a mistake and wanted to delete the
> file with no name with the operation:
> 
> rm -R //
> 
> This was a big mistake which I noticed soon enough (some files in /bin were
> deleted). I could repair the damage but what I want to know is what exactly
> is
> 
> rm -R //
> 
> deleting. It seems that it is deleting everything?
> 

It is, you're  recursively deleting / - multiple '/' are treated as one; try

cd //usr//bin

To delete the rogue file try

rm -i *

in the directory the file is in, answering 'n' for all other files.

If that fails, try copying everything you need in the directory it is in 
to somewhere else then recursively deleting the directory

rm -rf /path/to/dir/with/rogue/file

HTH

Mark

> Thanx in advance
> 
> Oliver
> 



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