patch created a recursive directory

[Courtenay Footman]

I know there was an extensive discussion of this subject a little while
ago;  unfortunately I did not file it and I was hit by the bug.

I tried to use Larry Wall's patch program for a group of files in seperate
directories (I was trying to install all the fixes for f77 in one go),
so I tried (from root) running patch from a higher level directory, while root
Patch did not work, and after stopping it (^Z, kill %1) I discovered 
that I had a recursive directory entry:

Script started on Sat Feb  2 14:04:00 1985
lnsvax# ls -ia junk junk/.orig
junk:
34820 .		    2 ..	34820 .orig

junk/.orig:
34820 .		    2 ..	34820 .orig
lnsvax# mv junk/.orig junk2
mv: junk/.orig: rename: Invalid argument
lnsvax# rmdir junk
rmdir: junk: Directory not empty
lnsvax# rm -r junk
rm: cannot read junk/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig/.orig?
lnsvax# ^D
script done on Sat Feb  2 14:04:55 1985

Is there any way to remove such a thing beside clri (followed, of course, by
fsck)?  Fsck did not find anything amiss with the file system! However, du
did not work, and while I don't know what such a directory would do to dump,
it doesn't look good.

Also, does anyone have a patch for patch so it won't do such a thing?
It seems that a link(2) was used, and since I was root, the system
did not complain that a directory was involved.  Some check should
be made for this somewhere.
-- 
Courtenay Footman			arpa:	cpf at lnsvax
Newman Lab. of Nuclear Studies		usenet:	cornell!lnsvax!cpf
Cornell University