AIX

hmmm, this is awkward. To be honest, I'm left to guessing.

Can you umount the file system? Have you already tried to reboot the system and delte the directory afterwards? I d not think that the reboot itself (that is: the reloading of the kernel image) will resolve the problem, but maybe stopping all the processes and umounting all the filesystems might help.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I umounted the partition, no luck. I will try and reboot it next, but I have my doubts as I am pretty sure the system has been rebooted since I first saw this problem.

bash-3.00# fuser /dev/hd1
/dev/hd1:
bash-3.00# umount /dev/hd1
bash-3.00# mount /dev/hd1
bash-3.00# cd /home/spark
bash-3.00# cd old
bash-3.00# ls
sp2f941 sp37c21 sp37c41 sp37c61 sp50061
bash-3.00# rm -Rf *
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp2f941/BUILD is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp2f941 is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp37c21/BUILD is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp37c21 is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp37c41/BUILD is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp37c41 is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp37c61/BUILD is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp37c61 is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp50061/BUILD is not empty.
rm: 0653-611 Directory sp50061 is not empty.
bash-3.00#
(yes, all of those dirs are empty)

I came back to this problem and found what was causing the empty directories to not be deletable.
A build script was running "dos2unix BUILD/*"
this caused the directories under the BUILD directory to be converted somehow. I guess dos2unix does something to the directory file/header that corrupts it. The directories disappear from BUILD, but are still being tracked somehow.
The only solution I have so far is to recreate the partition.

So, on AIX5.3, don't run dos2unix on directory names.

Thanks,