Delete a directory, crash the system

[Jason Lenthe]

On 07/27/2013 11:30, David Noel wrote:
> -- it's a laptop and I've inadvertently run the battery down to
> nothing a few times in the past. All the same, it was a very strange
> experience. I would not have expected a kernel panic from a simple rm
> -rf!

You may want to look into running fsck(8) and its myriad of options to
try to clean up the problem (assuming you're using a ufs filesystem also
see fsck_ufs(8)).  fsck normally runs during startup but perhaps a set
of non-default options will do the trick.

Also make sure you have soft updates enabled on your filesystem and
preferably journaled soft updates, if for some odd reason you don't, as
that is designed to avoid filesystem inconsistencies in the face of
things like power failures.

Sincerely,
Jason