Removing garbage files

[Lars Henrik Mathiesen]

gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>ronald at atcmp.nl (Ronald Pikkert) writes:
>>bill at TWG.UUCP (Bill Irwin) writes:
>>>[He has problems with garbage characters in file names on SCO XENIX]

>>Your shell probably strips the high order bit which causes rm to be unable
>>to delete these files.

>But that doesn't explain why "rm -r" would fail to remove them.

In 4.? BSD, the kernel will not accept path names with the high order
bit set in some character. I have never seen a BSD filesystem
spontaneously generate link names with high bits set, but a disk
failure could cause this. However, I know of two similar cases where
"rm -r" falied to work.

The first was on a SYSV system, where a disk problem had caused some
'/' characters to appear in a directory. clri/fsck to the rescue. Or
was it adb on the raw disk?

The other case happened to me a few weeks ago. We run a number of
MORE/bsd systems (4.3-tahoe with NFS, more or less). We also run a
number of Sun systems; one of them holds some users' home directories.
I got a problem report with the same gist: "ls -l *" reported (i.a.)
" not found". Somehow a file had been created with a name with only
high-bit-set characters on the Sun server (which allowed it). Nothing
could be one with it from the MORE/bsd machines.

One of these days I'm going to remove the check for the high bit in
remote filenames.

--
Lars Mathiesen, DIKU, U of Copenhagen, Denmark      [uunet!]mcsun!diku!thorinn
Institute of Datalogy -- we're scientists, not engineers.      thorinn at diku.dk