From: benny AT crocodial DOT de (Benjamin Riefenstahl) Subject: Re: HUGE filesystem PROBLEM (too big to be true) 12 Feb 1998 10:55:11 -0800 Message-ID: <34E2DF0B.CEC93BFC.cygnus.gnu-win32@crocodial.de> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Hi Nicola, Nicola Bernardini wrote: > 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. Looks like a bug in rm. It should of course report an error for the file and go ahead. > I go into that directory > and check: it contains a file called 'con.c'. It was put there via > untarring a unix distribution. Do you know exactly which tool you used for that? A file of that name should of course not be created on a Windows system (see below). > 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! That's right. For accessing DOS devices neither the path nor the extension are relevant. Every file somestring\con.somestring is treated the same as just CON . Nasty, ain't it :-(. It's a "feature" that WinNT inherited from DOS. > 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. I tried here and I can not create a file by that name by any legal means. I created a file con.gg from MacOS on a network volume, and I could not remove the file from my WinNT station. gnuwin's ls only shows it when I don't specify the "-l" option. "ls -l" presumably fails in stat() and just ignores the file. I can of course remove the file from the Mac that I created it with in the first place. > 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) I tried it (on the said network volume ;-) with a tar containing just the file con.gg and tar hangs (I can kill it with ^C). I'm using the original unchanged b18 (no coolview), WinNT4.SP3, Netware network volume. I tested text=binary as well as text!=binary. Looks like coolview is the main difference? so long, benny ====================================== Benjamin Riefenstahl (benny AT crocodial DOT de) Crocodial Communications EntwicklungsGmbH Ophagen 16a, D-20257 Hamburg, Germany - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".