2

What is going on here?

dave@dave-desktop:/mnt/w/Source/Sign/dist$ ls -la
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 1 dave dave 512 Feb 27 08:55 .
drwxrwxrwx 1 dave dave 512 Feb 27 09:09 ..
drwxrwxrwx 1 dave dave 512 Feb 27 09:09 signage
dave@dave-desktop:/mnt/w/Source/Sign/dist$ rmdir signage
rmdir: failed to remove 'signage': Permission denied
dave@dave-desktop:/mnt/w/Source/Sign/dist$ rm -rf signage
rm: cannot remove 'signage': Permission denied
dave@dave-desktop:/mnt/w/Source/Sign/dist$ whoami
dave

This is on "Ubuntu" running on windows 10 WSL.

11
  • 1
    Is WSL outside the scope of U&L because it's essentially Windows emulating an environment? Similar to asking a wine question on a MS Windows site? ...
    – RubberStamp
    Feb 27, 2019 at 14:20
  • Maybe. Running Linux in a VM on windows is also technically emulation. But there are certainly some extreme differences between the two. For example, netstat doesn't work at all, ps shows a limited process list, etc. Still, all I'm looking for is, is there anything going on here that would cause this on a linux system? If not, then I'm happy with just assuming this is Windows shenanigans.
    – Dave
    Feb 27, 2019 at 14:28
  • The /mnt prefix indicates that this may be removable storage of some kind. Is this a mounted filesystem, and what type?
    – Jeff Schaller ♦
    Feb 27, 2019 at 14:28
  • W: on /mnt/w type drvfs (rw,noatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,case=off)
    – Dave
    Feb 27, 2019 at 14:34
  • 1
    You are correct that it was locked. lsof shows nothing, but I found it with windows process explorer. I had a cmd.exe open in that directory.
    – Dave
    Feb 27, 2019 at 14:52

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

Permissions don't work as expected in mounted Windows directories in WSL.

See this example:

root@x250:/mnt/c/Temp# touch foo
root@x250:/mnt/c/Temp# ls -l foo
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ibm ibm 0 Feb 27 15:25 foo
root@x250:/mnt/c/Temp# chmod -v 644 foo
mode of 'foo' changed from 0777 (rwxrwxrwx) to 0644 (rw-r--r--)
root@x250:/mnt/c/Temp# ls -l foo
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ibm ibm 0 Feb 27 15:25 foo

Yuck!

1
  • I just want to know, What do people expect about permissions on NTFS. It has much more complex ACL model and only use SID(including user/group). So, why can we mount a NTFS without SID-UID/GID mapping and expect it work like a normal linux filesystem?
    – 炸鱼薯条德里克
    Feb 28, 2019 at 10:23
2

I can't even delete this directory from MS-Windows.

I found it with Windows process explorer.

It was locked. lsof shows nothing, but I found it with windows process explorer. I had a cmd.exe open in that directory.

-4

If the account "dave", which was used to create the directory, has root privileges, try sudo rm -r signage

1
  • 2
    sudo is not the solution to all problems, though it is often the cause.
    – ctrl-alt-delor
    Feb 27, 2019 at 14:37

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