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At some point hitherto, Jerry Feldman hath spake thusly:
> Somehow, one of my directories got corrupted, specifically 
> /lib/modules.2.2.4-16/kernel/drivers/usb/serial. This was effectively 
> preventing me from starting pcmcia. Once I figured out why pcmcia was 
> failing, I created a new serial directory, moved in the file names that I 
> could read. However, I could not get the rm command to remove the directory 
> with -rf --directory --force, or whatever.

In my experience, the swiss army knife of troublesome file removal is:

  find . -inum <inode number> -exec rm {} \;

This works regardless of what the specific problem with the filename
is (i.e. unprintable characters, leading dashes, etc.).  There are
numerous other ways to do it, such as by writing a program to process
the dirents and remove those with bogosity in them...

Also if enough of the first characters to specify the file uniquely
are printable characters, you can use command line completion to let
the shell figure out the right combination of bogosity for you by
simply pressing the tab key.  It'll even do the proper quoting for
you...

> The other question is when I do a reiserfsck with --check, fsck does report 
> some corruption and recommends using the --rebuld-tree option, but this is 
> on the root file system, and it refuses to run with this option on a 
> mounted files system.  I could boot from CD Rom except the CD-ROM on my 
> laptop likes to disappear each summer (Which I recently tracked down to a 
> loose cable).

Er, boot from floppy?  Don't use reiser on your / partition?  Sounds
like a sticky problem best avoided entirely...  But I s'pose that
won't help you now...

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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