On Wed 11 Nov, Neil A. Carson wrote:
> Dunno how emacs' directory editing works, but I doubt it accesses the
> underlying FS directly. If a file is unedeletable really, you cal clear
> the inode (clri), reboot single user and force an fsck to clear up the
> messed directory.

Thanks - this worked.

PS someone asked about ls -lo, which gave:

c--Sr-xrwt 1 1952796242 1919181889 nodump,sappnd 2924,41825 Mar 23 1987 cpus.h

Any attempt to chance the file permissions gave "Permission denied",
except clri [from single user mode] which worked as described by NC.

-- 
Stephen B Streater