Black hole file

[Juergen Wagner]

In article <8776 at alice.UUCP> debra at alice.UUCP () writes:
>Sounds like you have a brain-damaged shell that treats "blackhole"
>as a name for /dev/null.

Hmmm... I doubt that's the case. If the file were realized as an internal
shell alias for /dev/null, you wouldn't get an inode number, and (what's
even more interesting), you wouldn't get the same inode number every time.
Since the original poster found out the inode number, I guess he has checked
that "blackhole" is not just a symbolic link to /dev/null, or another /dev/null
with the same device id. Also, the fact that you can re-create it makes the
story more suspicipous.

I think, one should try a few things:

[1] If the file is created on an NFS file system, try the same on the host
    exporting the file system.

[2] Delete "blackhole", create some other files, and re-create your black
    hole. Does any of the other files have the same black hole behavior?
    Is "blackhole" still one?

[3] Try another shell.

If you are running NFS, I suspect an NFS problem. On some occasions
(non-reproducible), I noticed that some files appear to have some empty blocks
in them (zero bytes), although they seem to be fine on the NFS server.

Good luck,
-- 
Juergen Wagner		   			gandalf at csli.stanford.edu
						 wagner at arisia.xerox.com