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From: eschle@forty2.physik.unizh.ch (Patrik Eschle)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.internals
Subject: remove directory with null filename
Message-ID: <1410@forty2.physik.unizh.ch>
Date: 19 Dec 90 13:02:46 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.questions
Organization: Physics Institute University Zuerich, Switzerland
Lines: 35

The following is on Concentrix 5.5 (BSD 4.3).

We have somehow (a PC and NFS were involved) succeeded to create the
following directory entries:

   % \ls -aliqF
   total 3
      351 drwxrwxrwx  2 eschle       1024 Dec 19 12:57 /
      347 drwxrwxrwx  2 eschle       1024 Dec 19 12:57 ./
    57547 drwxr-xr-x 18 eschle       1024 Dec 19 10:48 ../

The first directory with inode nr. 351 has a filename of length 0.

We found no way to either remove this directory or it's parent. 

It seems, that 'opendir("")' returns a pointer to the current
directory '.'. This makes it impossible to access this no-name
directory. 

The friendly kernel denies even root the right to simply overwrite the
whole directory.

Before we start to write to the raw disk (Stefan is actually already
typing ;-): is there some legal way to remove this directory?

Please answer by e-mail, I'll summarize.

Thanks,

Patrik
-- 
Patrik Eschle, Physics Institute University of  Zuerich (Switzerland)
inet: eschle@physik.unizh.ch (bang: uunet!chx400!forty2!eschle)
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