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

[Jim Christiansen]

Hi Petre,

Thanks for the info...  Disk free is now showing that the drive is clearing 
out, but as your say- slowly!

I'll just wait it out as it was already to go into production as the 
replacement.

Jim


From: Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net>
To: jim at linux.ca,   "Support list for open source software in schools." 
<k12osn at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [K12OSN] Help! 280gigs of one student folder copied recursively 
into inself
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:18:42 -0500

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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