oddlu corrupted file during slink upgrade

[Jason Wright <peewee@scc.mi.org>]

Howdy...

I seem to have a corrupted file on this system which is preventing me
from upgrading manpages-dev:

gusgus:~ # apt-get install manpages-dev
Updating package status cache...done
Checking system integrity...ok
1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 165 not upgraded.
Need to get 0b/611k of archives. After unpacking 20.0k will be used.
Selecting previously deselected package manpages-dev.
(Reading database ... 26203 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace manpages-dev 1.18-1 (using manpages-dev_1.21-1.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement manpages-dev ...
dpkg: error processing manpages-dev_1.21-1.deb (--unpack):
 unable to make backup link of `usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz' before installing new version: Operation not permitted
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 manpages-dev_1.21-1.deb
E: Sub-process returned an error code

It's obviously corrupted and bogus:

gusgus:~ # ls -l /usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz
prw--ws---   1 505      38296           0 Jan  2  1970 /usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz

And I can't delete it:

gusgus:~ # rm /usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz
rm: remove `/usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz', overriding mode 2630? y
rm: /usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz: Operation not permitted

Or zero it out:

gusgus:~ # cp /dev/null /usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz
cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz': Permission denied

I've booted the system from a hamm rescue disk and fsck'd the partition.
There were no problems found.  I was also unable to delete the file
while booted from the rescue disk.  I wrote a quit perl script to
unlink("/usr/man/man2/iopl.2.gz"), but got back 'operation not
permitted'.  I suppose I could try C's unlink() instead, but I doubt I'd
get any better results.

This machine is still running 2.0.31 - I was hoping to get the slink
upgrade over and done with before bringing it up to something more
modern.  If a kernel upgrade will allow me to delete this file, then
I'll do it now.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

PeeWee

-- 
email: peewee@scc.mi.org - useless: http://www.scc.mi.org/peewee/ - efnet: Pwe
"Bad signs are everywhere coach. I tend to ignore them" The Era of Big Numbers