On Mon, 31 May 1999, Guy Santiglia wrote:

> After upgrading from 1.3.3 to 1.4,  I noticed a strange file:
> 
> B?S? ??m?t?qIB\B-]4L#d ?b
> 
> in my root directory.  It appears to be a directory:  # ls -l /
> 
> drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel      512 May 23 10:07 B?S? ??m?t?qIB\B-]4L#d ?
> 
> I can't seem to remove it.  "rm -rf " doesn't work.  The characters that
> I pasted into this email are not the same as the ones shown for the strange file
> in the root directory.  
> 
>   How can I remove a file like this?  And where do you think it came from?

These used to come up on my 486DX4. This was always after a crash or
hang. It seems to have gone away since swapping out the memory,
turning off the write-back cache in the bios, and formatting the
drive(s). You're running mac68k, right? If your's aren't the result of
a crash, about the only thing that might make a difference is the
write-back setting in the drives mode pages.

It's appears to be a completely bogus and random entry in the
directory. The reason you can't delete it is probably because the file
flags are set. Some of the flags will not even allow the super-user to
delete the file. The file flags are viewable as the fourth column of
`ls -lo'. You can only clear them, with "chflgs", from single-user
mode unless you have "options INSECURE" in your kernel config. Once
you clear all the (relevant) flags, you'll be able to delete the file.