Bill Studenmund wrote:

>find . -type w
>
>should give you the whiteouts.
>  
>
excellent. and I've since found out out that ls -W will also display them.

>Yes. I think the most appropriate way to handle this is "find /mount/point
>-type w -print0 | xargs -0 rm -Wf". There's both no need for this in the
>fs code, nor is this really something the kernel should be doing.
>  
>
yes, I agree to that partially. Having to do cleanups is a side effect 
of how whiteouts
are implemented, and I guess that this has become a feature by now. 
Anyway, this
kind of cleaning up is not up to the kernel.

To cut a long story short, I didn't expect whiteouts to be real 
filesystem-backed
objects; maybe I should submit a few lines for an updated mount_union man-
page to state this explicitly.

There is one thing that still bothers me; just for orthogonality of tools,
wouldn't  it be nice to have a command to create whiteouts in a directory
which is not (yet) mounted as an overlay?

Thanks.

Theo.

>Take care,
>
>Bill
>  
>