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

[Collins Richey]

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.

--
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.