Recursive delete problem (Reposted:)

Grahame Bowland gbowland at tartarus.uwa.edu.au
Fri Jan 14 01:11:49 GMT 2000


Hi,

(I'm reposting this because I was asked to by a subscriber :)

I believe I'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. The bug is present if deleting from a smbmounted point
under Linux or from Windows 98 through "Network Neighborhood."

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:

Grahame Bowland
Acting Systems Admistrator

--

$ 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


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