Cyclic directories (i-nodes) on the UNIX pc filesystem.

[Clarence Dold]

in article <1021 at icus.islp.ny.us>, lenny at icus.islp.ny.us (Lenny Tropiano) says:

> It was fsck'ing "/" root like it should have, and it said something about
> a directory link was wrong, adjust.  I did.  Then it said something
> about an unreferenced directory, should it reconnect.  I said yes again.

> # ls -liF /lost+found
> total 1
>  3388 drwxr-xr-x  3 lenny   icus         48 Nov  5 01:27 003388/

> # cd /lost+found/003388
> # ls -liF 
> total 1
>  3388 drwxr-xr-x  3 lenny   icus         48 Nov  5 01:27 icus/

> Now I thought that was strange, the i-nodes were the same.  Of course
> it pointed around in circles!

Because there was discussion of 'cc -o *.c' on the net recently, I am 
making the assumption that you toyed around with the possibilities.
If the super-user does 'cc -o junk junk.c', where junk happened to
be a directory, you will arrive at the above mentioned situation.
A normal user can't unlink a directory, but the super can, which is
exactly what ld does.
fsck can't figure out what to do, as you've noticed.
-- 
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