The Schisophrenic Inode

[System Manager]

Has anyone out there in netland an answer for this one?

I noticed that inode 10 on file system hp0f had two separate sets of modes,
owners, permissions etc. At the same time it was a perfectly ordinary file
as well as appearing elsewhere in the directory structure as a directory.
The only odd thing was that the directory did not have a name (all nulls
in the name field). I could happily look at the file, which contained some
information for emacs. When I did a ls -lR on the parent dir of the unnamed
directory it went into a loop, probably because of the null name. Other 
programs also went into endless loops, namely find and du.

Fsck did not think anything odd about the file system. When I cleared inode 10
fsck found both names and removed both. The file system now appears clean,
at least to fsck.

The real question is: "How come one inode could have two sets of mode bits,
two different owners and groups, two different sizes etc etc?"
The disk in question is a perfectly normal (up to now) rm03. we use 4.1bsd
and the standard driver.

The best answers will be reported back to the net.


Zdravko Podolski, Comp Sci Dept, Univ. of Glasgow, Scotland
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