Empty dir can't be removed ... because it's not empty?

[Rafa Grimán]

Hi :)

On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 11:10 PM Dave Chinner wrote
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 09:26:35PM +0100, Rafa Grim�n wrote:
> > Hi all :)
> > 
> > My /home is on an XFS partition all to it's own. The other day the lights
> > went out and when I rebooted, there's an empty directory that can't be
> > erased. This directory is a subdirectory in ~/.kde4/
> 
> Is your system using barriers (i.e. mounting with nobarrier option,
> or hardware that doesn't support FUA)? Directory corruption like
> this on power failure is a classic sign of a voltile drive cache
> being lost on power failure.


Nope, no barriers. It's a single internal SATA drive. It's my personal PC at 
home so no fancy hardware :(


> The output of dmesg from a system boot will tell us what hardware
> you have...
> 
> > The funny thing about this is that I can rename the directory, but I
> > can't delete it:
> > 
> > [root at mine albumcovers]# ls
> > .  ..  cache
> > 
> > [root at mine albumcovers]# ls -lah cache/
> > total 0
> > drwx------ 1 rafa users  6 Jan 10 02:23 .
> > drwx------ 3 rafa users 18 Jan 10 02:23 ..
> 
>             ^^^
> 
> It's link count is 3, meaning that it thinks that there is an entry
> in the directory. You need to run xfs_repair to fix it (and whatever
> else is broken).


Thanks Dave and Markus. The thing is that when the lights came back on I ran 
an xfs_check first and got nothing (no errors). When I got the error mentioned 
above, I reran an xfs_check (no errors) and an xfs_repair but nothing seemed 
to be wrong. Yup, partition was unmounted ;)

Maybe I messed up typing the command or go figure, it was too late. That'll 
teach me to go to sleep at a decent time of the night ;)

In any case, I just wanted to know if maybe xfs_db or some other tool could 
come in handy. Can't do any more checks since I repartitioned my drive and 
reorganized my storage. Had backups, no data loss so it was more of a 
curiosity. Backups: can't live without them ;)

Thanks for your time !!

   Rafa