Weird debugfs behavior

Question

I'm playing with debugfs. I first created a file:

debugfs -w /dev/vda1
> write /etc/hosts /a/b/c/d

And the file system is broken:

[root@linux2 /]# ls -l
ls: cannot access /a/b/c/d: No such file or directory
total 8388724
-??????????   ? ?        ?             ?            ? /a/b/c/d

The system looks broken to me too:

[978471.090291] EXT4-fs error (device vda1): __ext4_new_inode:989: comm SystemLogFlush: failed to insert inode 9190949: doubly allocated?
[978475.765474] EXT4-fs (vda1): pa ffff93f4732c4000: logic 2133, phys. 15753237, len 1963
[978475.767163] EXT4-fs error (device vda1): ext4_mb_release_inode_pa:3803: group 480, free 1962, pa_free 1960
[978475.814801] JBD2: Spotted dirty metadata buffer (dev = vda1, blocknr = 0). There's a risk of filesystem corruption in case of system crash.

Since debugfs does not support removing files by inode, how can I remove this file?

What's wrong here?

Answer 1

The simplest option to clean things up is to check the file system:

e2fsck -f /dev/vda1

What’s wrong is that you’ve ended up with a directory entry containing forward slashes, which shouldn’t happen. Current versions of debugfs don’t allow this, it seems your version does.