On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Rishabh Kumar Goel wrote:

> Sometime back i ran fsck on my system and during which it created the lost and
> found directory. The contents of the directory is attached hereunder. Now my
> root filesystem is full and to free some space i have to remove its contents.
> I tried "rm -f *" but it says Operation not permitted. How can i remove them?
>
>
> total 0
> c--Sr-xrwt  1 538976266   1953394499          800, 431973 Dec  9  2023 #02024
> c--xrw-r--  1 1461737806  1095914049         3954, 423536 Oct 26  2030 #02027
> br-sr-s--T  1 1277191017  1852138345          340, 271438 Sep  6  2028 #02028
> br-xr-Sr-x  1 1763904034  1970037614          364, 407120 Aug 30  1994 #02030
> br-Sr-----  1 1163087682  673206367          2080, 471619 Oct 30  2014 #02032

The simple answer is, use "ls -ol" to see the flags that are set on
the file, and "chflags" to change them. The "immutable" or "system
immutable" flags are probably set. Note that if you are at
secure-level 2, you may have to reboot to single-user before you can
change some of those flags.

Now to get the "big picture", observe that you have random bits set on
those files, not only the flags, but random mode bits, too. This means
your directories are getting corrupted. The most likely culprit is a
failing or overheating hard disk, but bad cache in the controller card
or motherboard, or bad system memory could do this, too. The other way
to get this is to mount the file systems "async", but barring that, it
indicates a hardware failure of some kind.

Frederick