Bob,
Thanks for the answer. I'd check the Suns if I could, but
that was 1 job (and about 12 months) ago. And, when performing
wholesale deletions, the odds are fairly good that I was
running as root (now that is a scary thought :-) ). It's subtle,
but the 555 directories fouling things up seems reasonable.
Sorry about the false alarm.
Thanks again,
- Don Buchholz
Bob Proulx wrote:
> Don
>
>
>> My understanding of "-f" might be incorrect ... I thought "-f"
>> would force rm(1) into removing a file, even if it was mode 444.
>>
>> However, the version shipped w/ RedHat 6.2 (fileutils v4.0p)
>> doesn't work as expected. For example, if I extracted the
>> attached (gzip'd) tar file, I would expect:
>>
>> # tar xvfz breaks_rm-rf.tar.gz
>> # /bin/rm -rf sis900
>
>
> Thanks for the report. But that is not a bug. The directories which
> contain the files are not writable and therefore the rm command will
> not remove the files. The -f option will remove files mode 444 but
> the directory which contains those files must be writable. Later when
> rm tries to remove the non-writable parent directory it finds it
> non-empty.
>
> Try these next commands on your example. I used a find command
> instead of chmod -R so that only the directories would be changed
> writable to show that rm -f does remove files mode 444.
>
> find sis900 -type d -print | xargs chmod u+w
> rm -rf sis900
>
>
>> to simply, and quietly, remove the entire tree. It doesn't.
>> (Maybe I spent too many years with SunOS and Solaris?)
>
>
> Check those Sun boxes again. I don't have access to a Sun machine
> today to verify this but I believe it works the same there. Certainly
> HP-UX and IBM AIX work this way as well.
>
> Are you sure you were not previously running the command as root? For
> root, all directories as well as files are writable. This case can
> only occur for a non-root user.
>
> Bob
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