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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cornell!tesla!mac
From: mac@tesla.UUCP (Michael Mc Namara)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: "dot" file deleted!
Message-ID: <542@tesla.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 5-Mar-85 22:52:05 EST
Article-I.D.: tesla.542
Posted: Tue Mar  5 22:52:05 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 07:29:21 EST
References: <161@sbcs.UUCP> <8565@brl-tgr.ARPA> <8566@brl-tgr.ARPA> <957@hound.UUCP>
Reply-To: mac@tesla.UUCP (Michael Mc Namara)
Organization: Cornell University, Electrical Engineering Dept.
Lines: 37
Summary: 

In article <957@hound.UUCP> pearse@hound.UUCP (S.PEARSE) writes:
>I've got a good one for you unix wizards. Somehow (I don't know
>how), the "dot" or "." file in one of my directories was removed.
>I cannot read nor access anything in the directory as a result.
>In fact, I cannot even remove the directory! Apparently, that
>dot file was pretty darn important.
>
>Result is, I have a useless directory taking up disk space.
>Question is, can someone tell me how to remove a directory with
>no dot file. Better yet, can you tell me how to re-access the files
>in that directory? When I type "rm *" to delete the hidden files,
>it says "* not found". When I type "rmdir [file]" it says,
>"directory not empty". Is there something I can do to remove
>the inode?
>
>Any suggestions appreciated! I am on Unix Sys V rel2, vax 11/780.
>
>
>-- 
>Steve Pearse
>ihnp4!hound!pearse

	The thing to do is to get someone with the su password to 
write a program (much like mkdir itself) that will use the link(2)
system call to link the directory, let us call it /usr/pearse/wasted,
to /usr/pearse/wasted/. 
	This should solve the problem (You need to be root to call link 
when linking to a directory)  A C program to do this would be:

main(){
	link("/usr/pearse/wasted",/usr/pearse/wasted/.");
}

	Of course, if all you want to do is remove the directory, that same su'er
could just unlink it.

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