file with no name -- cannot be deleted

Barry barrynyc at gmail.com
Mon Nov 6 03:21:42 UTC 2006


I have an annoying situation. I had a directory with a large number of
files that I deleted with rm -rf, but one of the subdirectories was
left with a file with no name -- seems to be an empty string. It looks
like the inode for the directory and the inode for this file are one
in the same.

First, I call ls -li on the parent directory and see this
$ ls -li
4232799 drwxr-xr-x 2 user user    16384 2006-11-05 17:31 yyy

So it looks like it has stuff in it, but there is no name to the file within:

$ ls -li yyy
total 16
4232799 drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 16384 2006-11-05 17:31

Of course I get:
$ rm -rf yyy
rm: cannot remove directory `yyy': Directory not empty

and,
$ rm yyy/*
rm: cannot remove `yyy/': Is a directory

and
$ rmdir yyy/*
rmdir: yyy/: Directory not empty

Different utilities say different things:

$ du -sh
du: cannot access `yyy/': No such file or directory
16K     yyy

Can anyone suggest what might have happened and how can I delete this.

Tia




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