[Techtalk] Re: Mystery Diectory and invisible Files

[Raven Alder]

Heya --

Quoth Raena Lea-Shannon (Sun, Aug 10, 2003 at 01:38:31AM +1000):
> In the process of removing all files from a failed install of Lopster I am 
> stuck with this weird Directrory with some mystery files in it.
> I cannot get any root permission to read or write as per below.
> 
> Can someone explain how to delete this. I have put in in trash and whenever I 
> try to empty trash it freezes X for about 2 minutes.

	What are the permissions on the directory itself?  (The
"pixmaps" directory, that is.)  You may also want to try

cd /home/raena/Desktop/Trash 
rm -rf pixmaps

from the command line, which should get rid of the pixmaps directory and everything under it.  

	I can't recreate this problem on my system (a very tweaked Slack
8 install) -- even with file permissions of 000 on the files or on the
directory, I can still list everything, remove it, chmod it, etc. as
root.

	As far as chattr goes, it was my first thought too, but I can't
think of any attribute that could be set that would have this effect.
Even immutable files can still be listed.  Ditto for undeletable files.
Try the manual "rm -rf pixmaps" as root, and see if that deletes your
files for you.

	A quick word of caution -- if you're more used to using the GUI
to delete files than doing it manually, you may not be aware that using
wildcards with rm -rf can be a very dangerous thing.  If you don't know
*exactly* what you're doing, it's very easy to unintentionally blow away
more than you meant to delete.  Like, your entire filesystem.  For the
obligatory cautionary horror stories:

http://www.geocities.com/krishna_kunchith/misc/rm.html
http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwboard/forum/14466.html

Cheers,
Raven

"Many heroics later (freezing, heating, slaving, hitting) it was
 declared gone."
  -- Corvin, about his dead hard drive