File deletion difficulty ...

[jeager]

... I've a file in one of the directories created by a user that I cannot, as root or the user, delete no matter what I try. Could it be a corrupted inode? Anyone know of a way to blast it

Tia.

[trickster]

Did you tried

chmod 777 myfile
rm -rf myfile

?

[jeager]

... Yes and I always get the following message:
chmod: failed to get attributes of `browse.4gl': Permission denied

I have not seen one of these stuborn items ever before.

[Outlaw]

try a lsattr on the file. It may be that there is an immutable or append only attribute on it. If so, do a chattr -i or chattr -a.

[jeager]

... I didn't even know about those commands. However, no soap. Here's the results:

lsattr
--------------- ./i_junk
elbert:/u/creico/accounting/org.4gm/i_junk # chattr -a browse*
chattr: Permission denied while trying to stat browse.4gl
elbert:/u/creico/accounting/org.4gm/i_junk # chattr -i browse*
chattr: Permission denied while trying to stat browse.4gl
elbert:/u/creico/accounting/org.4gm # rm -rf i_junk
rm: cannot remove `i_junk/browse.4gl': Permission denied

Thanks for the info.

[Schotty]

That is weird.

Can you boot off of a rescue disc or a live cd and kill the file?

[Compunuts]

What I've encounted the kind of stuff before is that I have some process that's actively using that file or directory. At times, I forgot that in one of my terminal sessions (either from this box or from SSH tunnel), I'm in the directory that I wanted to delete. At those instances, I needed to chase down where I'm locked in on important servers. But my home box, I just reboot it ( ) and have only one terminal and kill it there.

Or try to chown and chmod it as root.

chown root.root /your/file

or

chmod 777 /your/file

HTH ...

[jeager]

... but so far no soap. I'm still leaning toward a bad inode.

[Compunuts]

Then fsck that partition to see if it IS a bad inode.

[jeager]

Thanks. I'll pop open a terminal and take a look now.