Solaris 9 Discussion - rm -fr not fully working

I think that most commonly occurs when you have a filesystem mounted. The mounted filesystem permissions are seen when you do 'ls -ld <mount>', but the permissions of the directory underneath are used by some utilities.

You'll see similar errors with 'pwd' when a user is in the directory, but doesn't have sufficient priviliges on the underlying mount point.

Easiest solution is to unmount the filesystem, chmod the mountpoint, then remount the directory.

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Darren

Darren_Dunhama at 2007-7-10 14:43:15 >

The mount point in question is /tmp. Unmount it, fix the permissions underneath, then remount it.

Here's an example:

# mkdir /priv /unpriv

# chmod 700 /priv

# chmod 777 /unpriv

# mount -F tmpfs swap /priv

# mount -F tmpfs swap /unpriv

# chmod 777 /priv

# ls -ld /priv /unpriv

drwxrwxrwx3 rootother117 Apr 5 08:44 /priv

drwxrwxrwx3 rootother117 Apr 5 08:44 /unpriv

# su - nobody

$ cd /priv

$ mkdir a

$ rm -rf a

rm: cannot determine if this is an ancestor of the current working directory

a

$ cd /unpriv

$ mkdir a

$ rm -rf a

Note that in the 'ls' above, the permissions look identical. But because the directory underneath the mount points are not the same, it screws up.

There's no difference between 8 and 9 here. It's just that it's screwed up for you on this particular box.

You don't mention accounts. When you log into the box and can clean it up, are you root? This error is permissions based, so it won't happen to root. Only to an account without sufficient privileges on the underlying mount point.

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Darren

Darren_Dunhama at 2007-7-10 14:43:15 >