Re: problem with invisible/disappearing files - but inodes there
On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 16:52, invader_zim@cia.com.au wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have an unusual problem with 'invisible' and disappearing files: some files are not
> visible in a directory using 'find' or 'ls' on the directory, yet they
> are visible using tools such as 'debugfs' or if you know the actual name
> of the file, you can use 'ls' to list it explicitly.
>
> For instance, in the directory:
>
> /home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch
>
> you can ls -la it, and find no files:
>
>
> stampy:~# ls -la /home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch
> total 8
> drwxr-sr-x 2 louisb staff 4096 Jun 25 11:45 .
> drwxr-sr-x 7 louisb staff 4096 Jan 4 14:05 ..
>
> Yet when you 'ls' the files directly (which we find from the log of a
> daemon that places them there), they are there:
>
> stampy:~# ls -la
> /home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch/1088004896841
> -rw-r--r-- 1 louisb staff 1 Jun 24 01:34
> /home/stampy/queues/sendsyphonemailqstore/q_dispatch/1088004896841
> stampy:~#
>
Very bizarre. I see that when you do an ls, the following line has:
total 8
So it appears there are actually 8 files in that directory.
Perhaps there is a file with a very strange character in it, which is
causing ls to terminate?
Why not try:
find q_dispatch -print >/tmp/files.txt
then use "od -cx" to see what is really in that dir listing? Look in
particular for an "empty line", which might indicate a problem.
The "od" program is used to handling any sort of input, so you will
definitely see everything generated by find.
You might also want to try
rm -i *
to "interactively" select files for deleting. I have found this useful
in the past when a file with a bizarre name needs to be deleted.
Cheers,
Simon
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