dag@fciva.FRANKLIN.COM (Daniel A. Graifer) (12/19/90)
We just cleared up an interesting problem that I don't believe I've
seen mentioned in this group over the last couple of years, so I
thought I would pass it on.
The symptoms. We run /etc/cleanup out of root crontab every Sunday
morning. This script contains the following line:
find / -name core -atime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;
About 4 weeks ago, this began failing, generating a page full of
error messages like:
find: stat() failed: /usr/ldbin/wp5/standard.prs: no such file or directory
An examination of the named files showed they were perfectly normal. To make
a long story short, the file name just befre this one, "spell.exe", supposed
to be a Merge386 executable, was showing in an ls -l as a directory! Looking
at the directory, we recognized it as a log directory for our database, and
in fact, cd'ing into spell.exe, then 'cd ..'ing left you in what was obviously
the database directory, but pwd had you back in /usr/ldbin/wp5!
Anyways, it was clear that the entry for spell.exe in the wp5 directory
somehow got hosed, and now was a second link to the log directory. A
quick /etc/unlink cleared up the problem. Anybody have any ideas how this
could have happened in the first place? In fact we had two such bogus
file/directory mixups in the wp5 directory!
Hope this helps somebody someday!
Dan