[lug] file system frustration - the file that won't die?

[Ken MacFerrin]

Collins Richey wrote:
> On 4/24/06, Ken MacFerrin <lists at macferrin.com> wrote:
> 
>>Zan Lynx wrote:
>>
>>>On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 17:21 -0600, Ken MacFerrin wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>This was all as superuser..  So according to "rm" it can't forcibly
>>>>delete the parent directory because of this "block" file but according
>>>>to "ls" and "file", the "block" file doesn't exist??
>>>>
>>>>lsof doesn't show this directory as being in use and I even tried to
>>>>reboot to see if I could kill whatever was holding on to it, but no
>>>>luck.  Filesystem is ReiserFS under LVM2..
>>>>
>>>>Suggestions??
>>>
>>>
>>>Sounds like a job for fsck!  If it is your root partition you may need
>>>to boot from a rescue CD or initrd / initramfs with ReiserFS fsck tools.
>>>
>>>With ReiserFS you may be able to fsck a read-only mounted root
>>>filesystem, but the ReiserFS tools make *no* guarantees that any file
>>>access will work after fsck returns, since it may have completely
>>>rewritten the tree.
>>
>>
>>Yep.. that did it.  I had to run --rebuild-tree to fix it but it seems
>>all is well now.  I just overlooked this completely since I hadn't had
>>any recent crashes, hard reboots or heavy disk activity to corrupt it.
>>I'm starting to loose faith in Reiserfs these days.. may be time to head
>>back to XFS..
>>
> 
> 
> I'm glad you were successful. Just for future reference: another cause
> of directories that can't be removed is this - I fell into this trap
> at work. If you have done a 'chattr +i ....' on any files in the
> directory, you won't be able to 'rm -rf' the directory until you have
> done 'chattr -i ...' to fix the offending files.
> 
> Another fyi. Many have good luck with reiserfs, but all 3 of my
> personal attempts to use reiserfs in the past led to fs corruption
> after a power failure. Never again in this lifetime.
> 

Thanks, Collins.  For reference, I did try chattr -i following bgiles 
earlier suggestion but struck out.  Again, appreciate all the help.
-Ken