How do I unlock a file ? / SOLVED !

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 07:45 +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:

> I believe the reason for the existence of rmdir in addition to rm is a
> safety consideration: if you use rmdir, you can be absolutely sure (even
> when running it from a script) that a directory will _only_ be removed
> if it contains no files.

rmdir historically existed before the recursive flag to rm.  In the very
early days of Unix (1970s), you had to manually empty a directory before
deleting the directory.  rmdir was originally a setuid program with root
privileges.  Only root could add or remove files which were directories.
Later on the BSD folks added a rmdir() system call which allowed
ordinary users to remove their own directories, but they still had to be
empty.

If you could delete non-empty directories without deleting the
referenced files, you can end up with files without a reference in any
directory which would be a bad thing. Explicitly deleting the file
references insures the file reference count in the file inode gets
decremented correctly. The "-r" flag to rm automates what was before a
manual process.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 451 9005