Subject: Re: interesting problem with "find"
From: [email-masked] (Chris Faylor)

11 Nov 1997 18:07:25 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]

In article <[email-masked]>,
Bartlee A. Anderson <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I've noticed a similar problem with rm.
>In directories with structure something/yada/yada/other/...
>rm -rf will tell you that you have a circular directory structure and to
>notify your administrator, it is almost certainly corrupt.
>You have to remove from the second yada and then once it's gone, the
>original command will work. Yuck.

I don't think that this is a problem with your directory.  More likely,
this is a problem with cygwin's calculation of inodes.  rm -rf keeps
track of the inodes of directories that it deletes.  If it comes across
a directory with the same inode as one it thinks that it has already deleted,
then it thinks something is wrong.

Since Windows does not support the concept of an inode, cygwin has to
create its own.  It bases the inode on the name of the file.  So, if you
have two directories with the same name, they'll have the same inode.
When rm -r sees these two (different) directories with the same inode,
it complains.

Currently, the only workaround is to delete the lower level subdirectories
by hand.  Sorry.
-- 
http://www.bbc.com/	[email-masked]			"Strange how unreal
VMS=>UNIX Solutions	Boston Business Computing	 the real can be."
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