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Date:      15 Sep 2002 20:53:39 -0700
From:      Chip Wiegand <chip@wiegand.org>
To:        Matthew Emmerton <matt@gsicomp.on.ca>
Cc:        Questions FreeBSD <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Help! a directory won't go away even as root -SOLVED
Message-ID:  <1032148419.216.8.camel@chip.wiegand.org>
In-Reply-To: <042301c25d11$a658f470$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca>
References:  <1032133467.216.2.camel@chip.wiegand.org>  <042301c25d11$a658f470$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca>

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On Sun, 2002-09-15 at 16:43, Matthew Emmerton wrote:
> > I have a directory that I can't remove. It's empty and looks like this:
> > dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Aug 14 12:18 empty
> > It's even called empty. Anyway, I can't rm -rf, I can't chmod, when I
> > try I get Operation not permitted, while logged on as root. I have to
> > get rid of this, I can't create a ln -s because this is messing it up.
> 
> 'ls -alod empty' will most likely show a flag of 'schg'.  Do 'chflags noschg
> empty' and then you should be able to rm -rf without problems.
> 
> --
> Matt Emmerton

Thanks to all who replied so quickly. That was exactly the problem. I've
never seen the immutable flag before. Something new to learn about.

I had just installed fbsd-4.6.2 and then was in the process of moving
/var to /usr/var and linking /usr/var to /var - like this -

mkdir /usr/var
cd /var
tar cf - . | (cd /usr/var; tar xf - )
cd /
rm -rf /var
ln -s /usr/var /var

That's when I couldn't get rid of the directory /var/empty, I have no
idea where it came from, if it was there by default, or what. I've done
this every time I've installed freebsd and this is a first.

Thanks for the tip everyone,
--
Chip




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