[K12OSN] Help! 280gigs of one student folder copied recursively into inself

[Petre Scheie]

I ran into a similar problem some years ago: a bug in Mandrake's logrotate caused 
certain files & directories in /var/log to be copied and then renamed; but this meant 
that each day the previously-archived logs were also copied to new files, which was then 
repeated the next day compounding the problem, and so on and so on.  After a few weeks, 
there would be hundreds of thousands of files.  We used to call it the Sorcerer's 
Apprentice problem, since it modeled Mickey Mouse's experience with a certain 
magical-broom-run-amok.

Anyway, I can tell you from that that running 'rm -rf /directory' CAN take a long time 
in a case like this.  And if you've got 320GB to plow through, I wouldn't surprise me if 
it needed to run over night.  If it's all on a separate partition, it would be quicker 
to just reformat that partition, but I'm guessing that's not the case.  You may just 
have to wait it out.  Or reinstall.  Considering that a stock install only takes about 
20 minutes on a modern machine, it would be faster to go that route, assuming you can 
afford to lose any data that's on the system.

Petre



Jim Christiansen wrote:
> I don't know how this happenned, but I started an scp job of my student 
> homes from the old server across to the new server and walked away.  
> Today I have found that the 8 gigs of data has grown to fill the entire 
> 320 gig drive, most of it being one student's directory recursively 
> copied into itself...
> 
> The old server drive is failing but I can't see how this could affect 
> the s copy...  I did and fschk to get it to reboot before the scp job.
> 
> The new server can not seem to rm -rf the offending folder.  I have been 
> waiting about one hour, and still nothing.
> 
> Is there any other way to get this removed?
> 
> Thanks,  Jim
> 
> 
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