Subject: HUGE filesystem PROBLEM (too big to be true)
From: [email-masked] (Nicola Bernardini)

11 Feb 1998 21:57:38 -0800
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To: [email-masked]

I hope this has not already cropped up several times. I regularly
wade through all the mails of this mailing list and did not find
anything similar. I would not know what to search exactly in the
past years mail archives (wait to hear).

I recently recompiled fileutils in order to fix the rm bug
that cropped up (with its solution) a few weeks ago. I patched rm.c
and ran it happily through all the directory trees I wished to delete.
On a particular directory tree which is a backup of a project
I am working on (fairly happily, I must say) with the cygwin project,
rm -rfv locks up and cannot be killed in anyway. I go into that directory
and check: it contains a file called 'con.c'. It was put there via
untarring a unix distribution. Now, looking at con.c with ls -l
gives 

crw-r--r--   0 0        Everyone   0,   0 Jan  1  1970 con.c

which is to say that it sees it as a character device, the console!

I spare you the details: I tried to remove and/or rename the file,
the directory that contains it, the tree, etc. with rm -rf, with
del on a dos console, with mv, with the explorer. There is absolutely
nothing to do: it won't go away. I checked and there is no way
to create a file named con.c by redirection, vi, or whatever.
But if the file is create untarring an archive, then it'll exist
and it'll never ever go away... (In other words, it's something really
easy to reproduce, if someone has the guts to do it)

Does somebody have a clue on how to remove this thing? I do not
expect much out of Windows NT, but I hope this problem can be
solved via the cygwin platform...

I am using Win NT 4.0 SP3, gnuwin b18, coolview upgrade, inetd upgrade,
binary mounts, etc. etc. and everything else works *really very well*
(thanks to everybody working on it!)

Nicola
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicola Bernardini
E-mail: [email-masked]
 
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture.  Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described
with pictures.

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