what is stuck here?!

[Garrett Cooper]

On Aug 23, 2005, at 8:34 AM, dpk wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Fafa Hafiz Krantz wrote:
>
>
>>
>> hello!
>>
>> how come *nothing* happens when i rm -rf directory/?
>> it just won't move ...
>>
>> top from another terminal tells me:
>> 55272 root     116    0 14396K 13768K RUN      0:27 36.13% 35.40% rm
>>
>> what? the directory/ only contains a .maildir/, a .muttrc and an  
>> empty directory
>> it's not an immutable flag that has been set,
>> chflags -R nouchg directory/ stands equally still to rm -rf
>>
>
> It's probably busy calculating the list of directory entries to  
> remove. If
> you have /proc mounted try:
>
> truss -p 55272
>
> to see what it is doing. If you don't, and you have KTRACE in your  
> kernel,
> you can try:
>
> ktrace -i -d -p 55272
> kdump -l
>
> to monitor the process.

     Do you have any open filehandles as well in that directory? I  
could see this as being a problem if a program is keeping one or more  
files open in a directory and in fact the program is blocking rm -rf  
from completing its task. However, I've never seen Unix do this  
before; this would instead be a problem inherent of Windows.
-Garrett