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From: marka@dmssyd.syd.dms.CSIRO.AU (Mark Andrews)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: How do I unlink directories created with ln -f?
Message-ID: <7774@natmlab.dap.csiro.au>
Date: 2 Jul 90 04:15:34 GMT
References: <26899A74.24533@orion.oac.uci.edu> <1603@quando.quantum.de> <3575@auspex.auspex.com>
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Organization: CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics
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In article <3575@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
|>Suppose it's a bug in unlink.

|It is.  SunOS, for some unknown reason, disallows (at the system call
|level, not at the file system level!) *all* attempts to unlink
|directories, even by the super-user.

|>It seems really as if the only way would be a `clri' on the
|>inode of "dir1" and "dir2",

|They share the same inode; one "clri" is sufficient.

|>followed by a `fsck', which will remove the directories.

|...and shove everything that was in them into "lost+found", with cryptic
|names.

|Unless the directory in question was empty, I'd first make another
|directory at the same level as the link you wanted to keep, move
|everything (don't forget files, other than the obvious "." and "..",
|with names beginning with "."!) into the new directory, then do the
|unmount/clri/fsck.  (Don't forget the unmount.)

Fsck can actually pick this condition up (well it did it once). If you
move all links to the directory to a new directory, umount and run
fsck it should pick up the problem.

"IS AN EXTRANEOUS HARD LINK TO DIRECTORY" from strings of fsck.

Mark.