On Sep 9, 2004, at 6:13 PM, Greg wrote:
What the heck is going on... see below!
madrid:/Volumes/haza root# ls -lt /Volumes/haza/cstar/Public/Special/ total 16 -rwxr-xr-x 1 admin staff 6148 24 Jul 2002 .DS_Store drwxrwxrwx 2 admin apple_sw 68 3 Jul 2002 ????
I initially got the impression that the question marks were your way of obscuring sensitive information that should not be disclosed outside your company. Upon further thinking, I realized that they are the result of the -q option of the 'ls' command, which is a default in the Mac OS X 'ls' command (unlike in AIX and Solaris, which threw me off (every Unix is different)). The -q option helps reveal binary garbage in the name of file system objects. I doubt that this situation has anything to do with Unicode, but you may want to look at that same area through the Finder, and see if it makes any sense of it. It's possible that the owner of this system needs to do some fixit work to clean up its act. (I'd strongly recommend Norton Utilities or the like to further help straighten out this system.)
The binary file system stuff may or may not be inciting the ANS message situation, but it is certainly the case that backing up that system in its current condition may be a waste of time.
In my experience, every Windows or Mac should periodically be put through an appropriate file system and disk analysis to uncover structural problems and/or file irregularities, which can just get worse over time, and will inevitably cause problems, as you find now.
Richard Sims
