era@ncar.ucar.edu (Ed Arnold) (07/03/90)
A short time ago, I inquired as to how one could get rid of directory entries which contain '/' in the name. This problem came to light when find(1) (run from our autobackup system) started complaining that it couldn't locate files whose names appeared in directories. The source of these entries was identified to be a Cayman Systems Gatorbox, which gateways between TCP/IP ethernet and Appletalk. Such files are created via NFS, and a solution to this problem is to designate '/' as an illegal character within filenames, which is allowed by the Gatorbox software. The *ultimate* solution is for Sun to fix NFS (hint, hint :-)). This is a more urgent problem than it might appear, because one respondent noted that a dump(8) tape of a filesystem which has directory entries containing slashes, can be totally useless. Restore(8) barfs on it. I had noticed this problem a while back, but had cpio-format backups to fall back on. For getting rid of *existing* directory entries with this problem, there are a couple choices. Note that recursive remove (rm -rf) won't work under any circumstances; that's only a choice for weird characters in filenames *other* than '/'. If you have the luxury of taking your system down, then moving other files/directories out of the offending directory, and blasting away the offending directory via the "clri" command followed by fsck, is one option. If (like me) you don't have the luxury of taking the system down, then writing a short program to replace the offending '/' via use of the raw filesystem device, is the second choice. Thanks to the following persons for their suggestions: uunet!vrdxhq!escom.com!al@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Al Donaldson) chip@pender.ee.upenn.edu (Charles H. Buchholtz) mailrus!uunet!pdn.paradyne.com!hargen@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Bill Hargen) bears!eitel@relay.EU.net (Eitel Dignatz) geertj@ica.philips.nl cwl@odi.com (Charlie Lamb) jackal@epps.kodak.com (Phil Hammar) mau%alice.CSELT.STET.IT@EVANS.UCAR.EDU Ed Arnold * NCAR * POB 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000 * 303-497-1253(w) era@ncar.ucar.edu [128.117.64.4] * era@ncario.bitnet * era@ncar.uucp