file with no name -- cannot be deleted

[Prabhu Gurumurthy]

Barry wrote:
> I have an annoying situation. I had a directory with a large number of
> files that I deleted with rm -rf, but one of the subdirectories was
> left with a file with no name -- seems to be an empty string. It looks
> like the inode for the directory and the inode for this file are one
> in the same.
> 
> First, I call ls -li on the parent directory and see this
> $ ls -li
> 4232799 drwxr-xr-x 2 user user    16384 2006-11-05 17:31 yyy
> 
> So it looks like it has stuff in it, but there is no name to the file within:
> 
> $ ls -li yyy
> total 16
> 4232799 drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 16384 2006-11-05 17:31
> 
> Of course I get:
> $ rm -rf yyy
> rm: cannot remove directory `yyy': Directory not empty
> 
> and,
> $ rm yyy/*
> rm: cannot remove `yyy/': Is a directory
> 
> and
> $ rmdir yyy/*
> rmdir: yyy/: Directory not empty
> 
> Different utilities say different things:
> 
> $ du -sh
> du: cannot access `yyy/': No such file or directory
> 16K     yyy
> 
> Can anyone suggest what might have happened and how can I delete this.
> 
> Tia
> 

How about this:

find yyy/ -inum 4232799 -exec rm -rf {} \;

dont know on top of head what might have happened, but this is one among the way 
to do it.

Hope this helps.
Prabhu
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