Unable to delete directory

Question

On my OS X host, I am having trouble deleting the directory "foo".

mymac:.Trashes joe$ ls
foo
mymac:.Trashes joe$ ls foo/
Ảnh011.jpg  Ảnh012.jpg  Ảnh013.jpg
mymac:.Trashes joe$ ls -l foo/
ls: Ảnh011.jpg: No such file or directory
ls: Ảnh012.jpg: No such file or directory
ls: Ảnh013.jpg: No such file or directory
mymac:.Trashes joe$ rm -rf foo/
rm: foo/: Directory not empty
mymac:.Trashes joe$ sudo rm -rf foo/
Password:
rm: foo/: Directory not empty

As you can see, there are some files under the directory "foo" which I can only run ls on; running ls -l returns an error. I cannot delete the individual files or the directory. Using "Empty Recycle Bin" did not work either. I have also tried 'Disk Utility' -> 'Verify Disk' and 'Repair Disk'.

Edit: As requested, here are more info

mymac:.Trashes joe$ ls -del foo/
drwxrwxrwx  2 joe  staff  16384 13 May 11:19 foo/
mymac:.Trashes joe$ ls -del foo
drwxrwxrwx  2 joe  staff  16384 13 May 11:19 foo
mymac:.Trashes joe$ LC_ALL=C
mymac:.Trashes joe$ ls -ABeli foo/
total 1812
18972612676 -rwxrwxrwx  1 joe  staff  305951 13 May 11:19 Ảnh011.jpg
19123958587 -rwxrwxrwx  1 joe  staff  309745 13 May 11:19 Ảnh012.jpg
18511775654 -rwxrwxrwx  1 joe  staff  310907 13 May 11:19 Ảnh013.jpg
mymac:.Trashes joe$ find foo/
foo/
foo//Ảnh011.jpg
foo//Ảnh012.jpg
foo//Ảnh013.jpg

Answer 1

It appears that somehow you have entry names in foo which do not link to a valid node for a file. I'm not sure how that could happen or why rm -rf would not delete the entry from the directory even if it did.

But perhaps if you associate the directory entry with a valid file node it will delete? In other words, maybe this?

touch foo/Ảnh011.jpg
rm foo/Ảnh011.jpg

---

Hmmm. Does anyone else think the // in the result below is, well, unexpected?

mymac:.Trashes joe$ find foo/
foo/
foo//Ảnh011.jpg
foo//Ảnh012.jpg
foo//Ảnh013.jpg

I would have expected it to be as shown below. Could the // (whatever it is) have been a clue to the problem?

foo/Ảnh011.jpg
foo/Ảnh012.jpg
foo/Ảnh013.jpg

Answer 2

Have you tried renaming the files first? The files have a special character at the beginning "Ả". Try renaming the files first and then delete them.

Answer 3

Replies above are good, but there's another thing you should know.

By default 'ls' (or 'ls -l') doesn't show files whose names start with a '.' (aka "dot files")

To make sure you see all files use 'ls -a'.

It is possible, although not certain that you have other files starting with a '.' in 'foo/' and that's why it is not empty.

That said, they should have been removed with '/bin/rm -rf foo' so there has to be some other issue in that dir.

Answer 4

Try deleting the files with this command and then delete the folder.

find . -iname '*.jpg' -exec rm {} \;