Strange recursive delete problem.

[Grahame Bowland]

Hi,

I'm working for a company that has many users using samba and Red Hat
Linux 6.1. We've found a problem that we can reproduce using the latest 
samba release (2.0.6). It is fairly hard to describe accurately but I will 
do my best.

All of the users involved are in the group 'ihgtech'. The problem
involves recursive deletion of directories owned by another user
and the group 'ihgtech'.

Consider a directory 'source' with two sub-directories, 'a' and 'b'.
We have found that, even though all of the files and directories
below and including 'source' have write permission set for members
of 'ihgtech', 'rm -rf source/' fails with permission denied errors
for the sub-directories.

If we do a verbose rm, `rm -rfv' we see that rm believes it has deleted
files that are still there after the command has finished. Because these
files are left behind rm receives a permission denied error when attempting
to remove the directory containing the files.

We find the bug behaves in the same way each time, although we do not
understand the behaviour. I will attempt to illustrate below:

caltest2/ -- inc/ -- (files)
          -- src/ -- last -- (files)
                  -- (files)
          -- tmp/ -- (files)
		    -- (files)

Then, after `rm -rf caltest2':

caltest2/ -- inc/ -- (files removed, directory remains)
          -- src/ -- last/ -- (files removed)
          -- src/ -- (files)

Execute above command again:

caltest2/ -- src/ -- last/ -- (files removed)
          -- src/ -- (less files than before)

And again:

-- ALL FILES GONE --

Thanks for any help you can provide. Some system details follow:

--

$ uname -a
Linux bertie.ihgtech.com.au 2.2.5-15 #1 Mon Apr 19 23:00:46 EDT 1999 i686 unknown

$ rpm -qa | grep samba
samba-common-2.0.5a-12
samba-client-2.0.5a-12
samba-2.0.6-19991110

Grahame Bowland
<gbowland(a)tartarus.uwa.edu.au>