rm -fr not deleting stuff

[Karl Auer]

On Tue, 2015-02-24 at 09:50 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
> On 23 February 2015 at 23:17, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> > Anyway, when I tried removing a backup using rm -fr dirname it deleted
> > heaps of files out of the directory and its many subdirectories, but
> > also issued lots of messages about being unable to delete directories
> > because they were not empty.
> 
> Anything in syslog?  USB access problems?

Nope and nope. I'm wondering now if it is as Chris Green implies, some
kind of resource problem when recursing deep into the directory tree.
It's easily ten to twenty levels deep in places. However, I'd have
thought that would have caused an earlier error than the high-level "no
can do because directory not empty". And remember the effect is
identical in both rm and rsync.

Regards, K.


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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
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