Re: [opensuse] HELP - How to I delete a directory that won't die! (no rm -rf isn't the answer)

David C. Rankin wrote:
Listmates,

I must have had a script go bad and completely screw up a file or two in a directory and now I cannot "ls" the directory, I cannot "rm -rf" the directory, but I can "mv" the directory and I can "cd" into the directory.

The directory holds font files and I ran a script with "tr" in the scripts and I had the wrong arguments to tr and now there is a mess. The directory "V2" has the following properties:

drwxrwxrwx 2 david dcr 128552960 2009-07-16 22:28 V2/

I booted to runlevel 1 and fsck'ed the disk and it is fine. So, I know this is one of those cases where I have screwed up the files in the directory well beyond my ability just delete them and I'm --- stuck.

What is the best way to recover??

My guess that nothing is stuck, but you're just not patient enough....
Looking at the size of the directory, it contains a LOT of files. It takes
time to do *anything* in this directory.

We're having a CCD system that regularly dumps some 100-200000 files in one
directory. Doing a 'ls' or something similar easily takes up to 10 minutes,
and that's on reiserfs - ext3 will be even slower on that, I assume.

So just run your rm -rf and leave it running. It will eventually finish and
remove everything, but it might well take hours...

No idea wether 'unlink' might work better - never tried this.

Pit

--
Dr. Peter "Pit" Suetterlin http://www.astro.su.se/~pit
Institute for Solar Physics
Tel.: +34 922 405 590 (Spain) P.Suetterlin@xxxxxxxxxxxx
+46 8 5537 8534 (Sweden) Peter.Suetterlin@xxxxxxxxxxx
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