Cannot remove file: rm file not found

[Bassman449]

I have a file on an external hard drive that appears to be corrupted. I tried deleting the file and rm returns

rm: cannot remove : No such file or directory

If I run ls on the directory I can see the file clearly and running ls --size shows it to take one block.

I need a way to delete this file if anyone has any suggestions I appreciate it.

[sideways]

you can try unlinking it (as root)

unlink <filename>

or delete it via its inode, change to the directory containing the file and type something like

find . -inum $(ls -i <filename>) -exec -rm -i {} \;

[Bassman449]

I tried both suggestions but I still get the same "No such file or directory" error.

[sidebrnz]

Try using emacs in dired mode. If your drive is at /media/harddrive, you'd use this command:

emacs /media/harddrive

and emacs will allow you to edit the directory itself. It may be that there's a non-printing character in the file name, and if so, simply deleting all the characters in the name and entering a new one may be all you need.

[sideways]

does 'ls -i <filename>' return anything?

what filesystem do you have on the drive? Your file may have an unusual character in its filename, you can try grepping part of the filename eg 'rm $(ls grep <part of filename)'

or copy and paste on the whole file name, or, easiset method, have you tried deleting it from a graphical window like in nautilus (launch as root if necessary)



edit

the find command should have been

find . -inum $(ls -i <filename> | cut -d" " -f1) -exec rm -i {} \;

[Bassman449]

ls -i filename does return the inode number. I tried removing directly from the inode number returned by ls and received the same error. It is an ext3 filesystem with Fedora 8.

I can't delete from nautilus or anything because it is a server that doesn't have X installed. I've tried deleting the same file from Windows (it's on an external drive) and received a similar error.

[sideways]

so you're in the same directory as the file and ls -i <filename> returns the inode? Maybe try it like this

find . -maxdepth 1 -inum <inode> -exec rm -i {} \;

That'll prevent a recursive search which may be causing problems.

I didn't know about the emacs metthod, perhaps give it a shot if emacs is installed.

[Bassman449]

I tried your last suggestion and the weird part is that I get the line asking for confirmation of the file and it shows the filename correctly, but when you enter 'y' then it gives "cannot remove regular file no such file or directory"

I tried installing emacs but I've never used it before so I was unsure of how to overwrite the read only in dired mode.

[sideways]

I don't know about the emacs mode, but you could just go oldschool and install midnight commander, that's a text based gui file browser, press F8 to delete a file.

yum install mc

[sidebrnz]

In case you (or anybody else) needs it, here's a tutorial on file management with emacs:

http://xahlee.org/emacs/file_management.html

If you're having permissions trouble, I'd suggest doing the work as root so that you can override them.

[Bassman449]

I tried both mc and emacs and both give the same error. They show the file but if you try to perform any command on that file it gives "no such file or directory"

[sidebrnz]

I gather this drive is connected to a Windows machine. If so, your best bet at this point is probably going to be done on that machine. Ask whoever administers that box to run a scandisk or equivalent on it and see if that helps.

[Bassman449]

no the drive is connected to a Fedora 8 server. It is a samba share so I have tried to delete through explorer but that fails also.

[sidebrnz]

In that case, you should be about to unmount it, run fsck to correct any corruption then remount it. It's beginning to sound like the corruption isn't in the file itself but in the directory and this might help.

[MotherDawg]

Hi all,

I had a similar prob with a file named "X0=" created in my user tmp folder when testing one of my script that crashed...

I had tried the inode and all kinds of stuff... Sideways... when I read "mc", I went I'm DumbdumbdumbdumbDumb!

Punched mc, delete file, yes, file full of poop = gone!
Dam it !

Thanks a mill man.

*** Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. -- Albert Einstein
(was he talking about a file named reality ??? Probably not...)