ugly file permissions ??

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Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Date: 30 Jan 2003 19:58:34 GMT

> How do I delete this file? I have tried chattr, etc. without
> success. It appears to be viewed as a device. It is not in
> the /dev directory!!
>
> c---rw--wx  29816 1937012594 1914725664  47, 118 Jan 20
> 1995 screensaver-properties.desktop

umount the partition, then run e2fsck or reiserfsck on it, making sure to use the -f option if the fsck says "filesystem is clean." This points to a problem with your filesystem, and fsck is the best hope of getting rid of this weird problem. fsck will probably complain about a number of other things. Scan your logs in /var/log/messages for mentions of disk errors. If you're using a pre-2.4.5 kernel and you have a VIA IDE chipset, upgrade your kernel *NOW*.

Matt G

ugly file permissions ??

>>>c---rw--wx  29816 1937012594 1914725664  47, 118 Jan 20 1995
>
>>So this file is referenced 29816 times. Also, the owner of the file
>>is 1937012594, and the group owner is 1914725664. I would check the
>>consistency of the filesystem since these are fairly strange values.
> It's a broken file system, but so what. His best bet is probably to wipe the
> inode with debugfs then pull the plug and see if fsck
> fixes it on reboot.
> I.e. the FS isn't broken _enough_ yet. He needs to break it a bit more
> before the tools will notice.

Things like this are most commonly from a failing disk (maybe only 1 sector) or bad memory. Less common are controller or motherboard problems (less common in the sense that they would usually cause more wide spread problems).

The inode is junk, and need to be wiped. In addition to fsck though, I'd also run non-destructive disk analysis and any other hardware diagnostics available. Better to know sooner than later: this could of course be a rogue accidental write, but unless the owner plays with drivers or regularly is running dd etc. as root, there's probably hardware going south somewhere.

Tony Lawrence

ugly file permissions ??

> I had just run e2fsck and it found a small number of items, less then a
> dozen. Half of those were bad time stamp on free inodes. I will check the
> disk.
> How can I identify the inode?
> This is an ext3 fs. Will debugfs work?

The 'second' run of e2fsck fixed it. It found a dozen or so things it did not like all within a 4 inodes range. The file actually had device attributes.

Thanks, Dan