hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (08/12/88)
[lot of talk about unremovable directories, possible association with msh...]
I had this happen on my hard drive once, though I know it wasn't caused by msh.
While I do use msh, I found the culprit to be a corrupt copy of DCOPY 1.91.
Hard to believe that a bad download (I presume that was the cause) would leave
me with a still executable file, but execute it did, and when I tried to use
it to extract from an archive, I got some interesting screen wipes, but no
extraction. Wondering what the deal was, I played around some more, thinking
possibly I was doing something wrong. i somehow managed to issue a "create
folder" command, and couldn't escape from it. Finally I just hit a space and
then return. it created a directory named space on my hard drive. This
directory was very amusing in it's properties - it wasn't empty - I could not
remove it. It had only a single entry within it - a directory named space.
Not even a "." or ".." were in it. I could open that folder forever from the
desktop, if it would've let me. But it didn't matter, 'cause after opening it
once, you could never close it and cause yourself to drop back to the root
level.
The fix was to back up my entire partition, and then play with some sector
editors. Also pulled out my (blech!) MSDOS Tech Ref manual, (to look up the
FAT format & such.) and after a few minutes of sector editing I got the
directory back in working order. It was a rude experience, to be sure...
Ah well, that's what you get for playing in a strange, unstable environment,
I guess. (Moral - *never* *never* try to perform operations that involve
writing to a disk when you suspect the integrity of your currently running
program, or your system memory...)
--
/
/_ , ,_. Howard Chu
/ /(_/(__ University of Michigan
/ Computing Center College of LS&A
' Unix Project Information Systemscochrane@spot.Colorado.EDU (COCHRANE JIM T) (08/12/88)
In article <3348@druhi.ATT.COM> terrell@druhi.UUCP (TerrellE) writes: >For some reason, the shell included with the Mark Williams C package "msh" has >a habit of leaving me with empty folders that I cannot remove. >One folder that I cannot remove has no files in it, but when I try to remove it >from the desk top, I get an error message something like >"an item with this name already exists or it is write protected"... The >msh command rmdir doesn't work either. I don't remember that particular error message, but I've occasionally not been able to remove an empty folder with msh; usually if I cd to inside the directory and type rm * (even though it generates an error message), the rmdir command will then work on the directory. >Another unremovable folder is even more amusing. If you go inside the folder >(from the desk top), there is a directory inside the folder, but this >folder doesn't have a name. When you enter this directory, there's another >no-name directory, ad infinitum! I don't know about the infinite folder problem; sounds pretty bizarre to me. Are you sure your disk is ok? Does it look the same after you reboot or coldboot? cochrane@spot.colorado.EDU