topic Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory in Operating System - HP-UX

Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:41:52 GMT

I noticed I have an empty directory. As root, when I do an ls -la I receive the following:
Total 0

There is no "." or ".."
When I try to rm -rf the directory as root, it returns the following:
rm: directory not removed. Directory not empty

Anyone have an idea. Thanks in advance.

Tommy

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:44:49 GMT

Maybe its a special file or there is a soft link to it somewhere else.

maybe lsof or fusers -cu to identify a process on the fs

SEP

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:48:47 GMT

You probably have a file with a control character as the name --- or maybe even a single space.

cd to the directory and do an ls -b. That will display any non-printable characters in octal notation.

You can remove the directory d by issueing a recursive rm, rm -r dirname and that will remove all files/directories below dirname before removing dirname itself. Man rm for details.

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:52:49 GMT

There are no instances of the directory when running the lsof command. When running "fuser -cu " it would return:

fuser: could not find file system mounted at

Thanks

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:57:55 GMT

Clay,
There are no non-printable characters in the directory name, when trying to remove the directory recursively with "rm -rf", it complains that the directory is not empty.

Thanks

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Geoff Wild — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:00:56 GMT

Try moving it first:

mv DIR NEWDIR

Does that work?

No - what happens when you do a:

fuser -cu /YOURDIR

If yes, try ftp'ing to the server using a ftp client like WSFTP - as root - then try to delete the directory from within ftp.

Rgds...Geoff

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Jeff Schussele — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:07:11 GMT

Hi Tommy,

If you
rm -i /dir_name
does it respond with anything at all - even an invisible filename?
If so - reply "y" to remove it.

Rgds,
Jeff

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:09:07 GMT

Geoff,
I can mv the dir, but still cannot delete it after moving it. When running "fuser -cu ", it returns:
fuser: could not find file system mounted at .
Also tried through an ftp client and it complained about the directory not being empty

When trying to mv to a differant filesystem, it would return the following:

rm: directory not removed. Directory not empty
mv: : Cannot unlink

Any ideas on the "Cannot unlink"

Thanks

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Jeff Schussele — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:09:37 GMT

Hi,

Meant rm -i * inside that dir...

Jeff

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:23:51 GMT

Jeff,
When running rm -i inside the dir it returns the following:
No match

What do you think about the "Cannot Unlink" error when moving the dir to another filesystem?

Thanks

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Geoff Wild — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:24:02 GMT

Found this on google:

"I have seen this before. It happens when a directory has an extra hard
link. This isn't supposed to happen. If you do "ll -d" on that
directory, does it show 3 links? If so, then somewhere on the system,
there is (if fsck passes) another directory name that is the same
directory. Do "ll -ia" on the directory. This will tell you the inode
numbers of the directory and what it thinks is its parent. Then, you
can do something like "find / -inum [inodenum] -print" (where [inodenum]
is the inode number of "." from above) to discover where the two links
are. Now, do "ll -id" on both parent directories to see which one does
NOT match the inode number of ".." in the bad directory. Do an
"unlink" on the bad directory where the inode number of ".." doesn't
match the inode number of its parent. Then you should be able to
"rmdir" the other one."

Rgds...Geoff

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:30:23 GMT

Geoff,
Still no luck, when I do an "ll -d "
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 114688 Jan 25 23:28

When I do an "ll -ia ", it returns:
total 0

Thanks

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Geoff Wild — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:45:43 GMT

Tommy, - mv it back to the old dir name - then rerun the ll -d

Though I'm pretty sure you will get the same results....

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Geoff Wild — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:52:06 GMT

BTW - did you fsck the filesystem this DIR is on? you may have a corrupt inode....

Rgds...Geoff

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 18:08:38 GMT

Hi Tommy,

Try 'ncheck /dev/vgxx/lvolx > /tmp/.out' and search for this directory name. Note the corresponding inode and see if there is any other inode. If so, then it is a mere link. You may have to do 'unlink ' to get rid of it. Atleast you will find out what's going on with this directory. It will show the inodes corresponding to each path.

-Sri

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Elmar P. Kolkman — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 02:15:56 GMT

Could it be that the directory in question is a mountpoint? Perhaps NFS? Or is the filesystem containing the dir an NFS mounted filesystem? In that case, how does it look like on the NFS server?

If it is not, I would suggest to run an fsck on the filesystem the dir is in. Something or someone really messed it up... But that would mean you have to unmount it first.

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:39:36 GMT

Well, I tried umounting the filesystem and running fsck on it. This is what is returned

fsck /dev/vgX/lvolX

fsck: /etc/default/fs is used for determining the file system type
vxfs fsck: cannot stat -
vxfs fsck: file system had I/O error(s) on meta-data.
vxfs fsck: file system had I/O error(s) on user data.
log replay in progress
full file system check required, exiting ...

Now I can't mount the filesystem. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Geoff Wild — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:43:24 GMT

try fsck -o full

Rgds...Geoff

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Robert-Jan Goossens — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:44:15 GMT

Tommy,

# fsck -F vxfs -y -o full /dev/vgxx/lvolx

Regards,
Robert-Jan

Re: Cannot Delete Empty Directory

Tommy_6 — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:49:56 GMT

Tried the following:

fsck -F vxfs -y -o full /dev/vgX/lvolX

vxfs fsck: file system had I/O error(s) on meta-data.
vxfs fsck: file system had I/O error(s) on user data.
log replay in progress
pass0 - checking structural files
pass1 - checking inode sanity and blocks
vxfs fsck: fsck read failure bno = 89608, off = 0, len = 8192
file system check failure, aborting ...

Any thoughts?

Thanks