Re: Need to remove a ghost file, but can't because it doesn't exist

[Douglas Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 03:02:23PM +0000, J.A. de Vries wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a problem with a file which seems to not exist, but that makes
> applications like rsync, offlineimap and tar crash, because they try to read it
> anyway (not their fault as far as I can tell).
> 
> When I try to sync my mail using offlineimap it crashes after a while with the following output:
 
> So the system tells me the file is non-existant, but it does know the full name
> of that same file without me telling it. I don't understand how that is
> possible, but that probably is just due to lack of knowledge on my part. The
> problem persists over reboots, though. So I presume it is not due to some form
> of caching.
> 
 
> To be honest I don't know what to do next. I really want to backup my mail,
> but cannot because of this problem. To solve the problem I need to remove the
> file, but when I do try such I get told it isn't there. Any suggestions?
> 

I see from later posts that reiserfsck worked.  I used to have this
problem.  I tracked it down to a problem within reiserfs where it stores
small files within the directory structure itself (as a speed-up
measure).  I got tired of it and switched to JFS.  JFS offered me the
following benefits:

	Never any corruption even with intermittant hydro.

	Fast check after power failures.

	Since I never had any corruption I don't know about its fixing
	of corruption.  I've never had to run fsck manually.

	I was able to retreive all but one file off a hard drive that
	had a physical crash.  Perhaps I was just lucky but it was able
	to regenerate the directory structure automatically when I
	mounted it.

Now that debian has support for JFS in the kernel itself, I use JFS for
all partitions.

Doug.