Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!ulysses!andante!alice!debra
From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Ghost file
Message-ID: <8430@alice.UUCP>
Date: 15 Nov 88 19:36:39 GMT
References: <17529@adm.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs
Lines: 29

In article <17529@adm.BRL.MIL> ZAT011%DJUKFA11.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Thomas Heil) writes:
>Hello, folks!
>
>I got a little problem with  a "ghost file". It appears when I  list the
>contents of  a directory, but  it can't be accessed  in any way  - every
>program tells  me it doesn't  exist. It can't  even be removed.  But the
>directory (only containing that file) cannot be removed because it's not
>empty. And I can even create another  file with the same name which then
>appears  twice...
>
I would suspect that the name of the ghost file contains a non-printable
character, which doesn't show up when you try ls. A way to find out is
to make an octal dump of the directory.
Another way of trying to delete the file is to try to generate the name:
if it appears as "ghost" in the directory you could try
rm *g*h*o*s*t*

I assume you ran fsck already, so the file system probably is not corrupt.
Normally you will never be able to create a second identical entry in the
directory.

Hope this helps.

Paul.

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