Disappearing files

[David Hyams]

I have just had problems with some files become invisible, 
does anyone have any ideas what's going on???


sun11:biel> ls xrb.h
xrb.h                           # file exists
sun11:biel> ls x*.h
xcomm.h     xfdata.h    xkeyhan.h   xmp.h       xshowinf.h  xwarn.h
xcommuni.h  xfileacc.h  xlib.h      xmvsint.h   xst_han.h   xwkmifac.h
xdebiter.h  xinfo.h     xmoddriv.h  xnumdis.h   xstats.h    xzmiface.h
xdial3.h    xinterp.h   xmodem.h    xpmdata.h   xsupervs.h
xdigdis.h   xio3.h      xmonitor.h  xscan.h     xuserint.h
sun11:biel> 


notice anything? xrb.h not listed!!
Now, lets try and rename the file...

sun11:biel> mv xrb.h XXXX
sun11:biel> mv XXXX xrb.h
sun11:biel> ls x*.h
xcomm.h     xfdata.h    xkeyhan.h   xmp.h       xscan.h     xuserint.h
xcommuni.h  xfileacc.h  xlib.h      xmvsint.h   xshowinf.h  xwarn.h
xdebiter.h  xinfo.h     xmoddriv.h  xnumdis.h   xst_han.h   xwkmifac.h
xdial3.h    xinterp.h   xmodem.h    xpmdata.h   xstats.h    xzmiface.h
xdigdis.h   xio3.h      xmonitor.h  xrb.h       xsupervs.h
sun11:biel> 

xrb.h has magically reappeared!!
Now, what about this -

sun11:biel> ls | wc
     271     271    2117
sun11:biel> 

but if somebody else logs in and tries the same (ls | wc) he gets

    280      280    2201

which is what the answer should be! Any ideas?

I suspected that the directory entry got corrupted somehow (so how 
come other people get the right number of files listed while I get 9 
less than this?), so I copied all files to another directory and 
deleted the old one. Everything seems to be OK now, but I'm still a 
little worried...

BTW, this is a SPARCstation 1 connected to a server running NFS.
OS version 4.1 (I think)