Thanks all.
I will still have to do the fsck thing, as my laptop seems to have some obscure hardware defect that means that I can't do a warm reboot - I always have to shut it down and do a cold start. This isn't a Linux or a Windows problem, it just won't do a warm start. Not worth the expense of getting it fixed.
Douglas.
Matthew Gregan wrote:
At 2004-06-02T111052+1200, Nick Rout wrote:
sorry i just see people going off at awful tangents. I don't know why
anyone thought your file system was corrupt.
Because it's fun to sound like you know what you're talking about, even if you have not tried to understand the problem first. ;-)
Given that UNIX filenames can contain almost any byte except 0x00 and 0x2f, it's not particularly surprising to see filenames with unreadable characters--except if you don't know how they got there.
How about just deleting the offending file?
Agreed. This can be tricky with unprintable filenames.
Sometimes the easiest way is to select and delete the file by its inode number.
$ ls -lai 6774 -rw-r--r-- 1 kinetik kinetik 0 Jun 1 18:05 \317\200
$ find -inum 6774 -ok rm {} \;
I guess it won't hurt to fsck anyway. what filesystem are you running?
If it's just a desktop box, and he doesn't mind waiting a while for the fsck to complete, you're correct that it won't hurt. He doesn't need to know what filesystem he's running, and he doesn't need a bootable rescue image. As Sasha said many messages ago, use shutdown(8) to force a fsck on boot:
# shutdown -rF
Note that this will force a fsck of all filesystems. If you've got many seperate filesystems, it'll be quicker to boot into single user mode and fsck only the suspect filesystem.
Cheers,
-mjg
