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From: ask@cbnews.cb.att.com (Arthur S. Kamlet)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: File remove command?
Message-ID: <1991Jun15.210940.18999@cbnews.cb.att.com>
Date: 15 Jun 91 21:09:40 GMT
References: <3431@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: ask@cblph.att.com
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories,  Columbus, Ohio
Lines: 36

In article <3431@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>Has anyone written a remove command which will unlink all links to a
>file inode when the command is issued on any one name?

The heart of this command is to find the inumber;
then remove all files in that filesystem with that inumber.


For SVR3 Unixes - at least - you can find the inumber by an ls -lai

$ ls -lai junk

  397 -rw-r--r--   1 ask      user         571 Mar  5 15:07 junk


So, you now want to remove all files with inumber 397

You need to know the root directory of your filesystem

(use the /etc/mount or df command to find out if you are unsure)

Then do a find and remove all occurences of that inumber

$ cd /usrc    # /usrc is the filesystem containing the files

$ find  .  -inum 397 -exec rm {} \;


Caution:  inumbers are not unique in your system; only in your
          filesystem.   So it's a very bad idea to do a
                        find / -inum 397 .....

These are the basics; you might want to put these together in a
script and add some tests.
-- 
Art Kamlet  a_s_kamlet@att.com  AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus