[ale] How can I delete links that can't be seen by stat?

[James Sumners]

"I have an NFS mount where I send nightly backups." was meant to
indicate that this is all that I am seeing from the client side of
things. I do not have console level access to the remote device.

The administrator of the device (a QNAP system) sees the same thing
when SSHing to the device. So there must be something corrupt with the
file system (possibly?). I haven't seen anything like this before.

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 2:49 AM, Michael B. Trausch <mbt at naunetcorp.com> wrote:
> On 12/11/2012 01:00 PM, James Sumners wrote:
>>
>> In the screenshot, you'll see a list of links that have no properties
>> whatsoever according to `ls`. These are supposed to be hard links.
>>
>> Here's the scenario:
>>
>> I have an NFS mount where I send nightly backups. These nightly
>> backups use a common "full backup" and a series of differential
>> backups. I'm using rsync to do this. At some point, the nightly
>> backups failed due to low disk space and got out-of-sync. So I'm
>> removing old backups and starting anew. However, after deleting the
>> first few "old" backups I encountered this problem where `rm` can't
>> remove these files since it can't lstat() them.
>>
>> Anyone know how I can delete these links?
>
>
> Is this system the host filesystem, or the filesystem mounted via NFS?
>
> If the latter, I would take a look at the files themselves, using a shell
> session on the NFS server.  Perhaps they don't exist anymore, but NFS
> doesn't remember deleting them or something?  Or perhaps Something Bad
> Happened™ to the backing filesystem and the files look the same there.
>
> If _that_ happened, then the filesystem should be reinitialized and its
> contents restored from a backup, after taking an image of it to try to
> investigate WTF went wrong.
>
> A whole lotta "if"s.  More information would be useful... :-)
>
>         --- Mike

-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
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