redirection can create nul files - Was: rm hangs on illegal filename nul

Volker Quetschke quetschke@scytek.de
Thu May 27 14:46:00 GMT 2004


Hi Dave,

>>I somehow managed to create a file named nul (further investigation
>>pending), and now rm -rf hangs when trying to remove the 
>>directory with
>>this file.
> 
>   Known ('doze) problem.  Also occurs with filenames like aux, com1, lpt
> etc.  The workaround is WDDTT.
No, wrong, the problem arises from cygwins new ability to create
filenames named nul.

Binary mount. Try:
$ echo hello > nul

when you do this with 1.5.10 you get a nice file named nul, 1.5.9
just ignores it. Yes, you're perfectly right, don't do it when it
hurts, but I stubled over this problem because the software I'm
compiling has (now obviously) broken build scripts, and now I have
a few undeletable files on my harddisk.

In my previous mail I said "rm -rf nul" can remove the file, no,
when you provide the complete path rm just doesn't complain/hang.

Any ideas how to remove the nul files? Really, I don't want to
format my disk because of this.

Volker

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