Thanks Jim and Craig for the suggestion to do fsck and possibly write off the partition, as noted it is a backup drive and 1 of 2 that are regularly rotated because you never know when something might go wrong! I expect (and will check) that my rsyncs will have the correct files copied over next time I use that drive, it will just be a longer than normal sync. Not that it matters because it will be out of hours anyway.
So I'll consider the problem solved. Cheers, Roger On 17/01/11 14:02, Jim Cheetham wrote: > On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Roger Searle<ro...@stepahead.org.nz> wrote: >> /media/drive/2003/2003/2003 (repeat many MANY times) >> /2003/somephotos.jpg. Attempting to do rm -rf may be doing something >> (shows in htop, taking a few % of a core) but a few hours later is still >> not done. Looking at the properties of the top level folder in a file >> manager, it reads for ages trying to determine number of folders and >> gets to a brick wall at about 140,000 folders and kills my KDE session! > So you have a structure of many directories, and at the bottom a set > of files? Or something different? > I presume you've removed the files at the bottom OK? > >> Any suggestions on how to remove the offending folders in some quick-ish >> and recursive fashion are welcomed, while leaving other folders in >> /media alone. > Errm, unlink() the top one (/media/drive/2003/2003 ?) using perl or C > or something that isn't the shell, then unmount and fsck the > filesystem :-) Then go remove anything left in the > /media/drive/lost+found directory ... > > That's a little dangerous though, but if you like living on the edge, go for > it. > > Also, given that this is a backup drive, don't bother preserving the > rest of /media/drive, consider nuking it completely with mkfs, and > then re-establishing the backups. > > Not sure what caused your problem, but I like to leave marker files on > my mount pounts, where they exist when a device is unmounted (i.e. not > /media/...) > > So when my drive is unmounted I might have "/data" -- so in there I'll > create a file called "/data/STOP". When the correct device is mounted > onto /data, this file effectively disappears -- so I can check for it > in the top of any simple backup scripts ... > > if [ -e /data/STOP ] > then exit 1 > fi > > This helps to detect unmounted directories, without having to know > anything about how they are mounted in the script. > > -jim > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-users mailing list > Linux-users@lists.canterbury.ac.nz > http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Linux-users@lists.canterbury.ac.nz http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
