How do I unlock a file ? / SOLVED !

[SYNass IT Ubuntu / Linux]

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 08:35 -0700, Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> 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


Hi and thanks once more for your efforts and feedback !
Mario has explained me somewhat similar. ;-)
 
Yeah long ago, in the 70'ies I worked with MVS and VM'es ...
... in the late 80'ies our company used CTIX on a Convergent and 
as "administrative user" I was happy to have a SE for system
maintenance !!

So truly vaguely I remember some things again after this long long
time !!! ;-D
Good to get pointed to these more sensitive commands again to avoid
problems !

Cheers, svobi