Thursday, June 05, 2008

Cannot remove Mac created directory ending with space

Had a curly one at work today. A Mac user had created a directory stored onto the Windows 2003 fileserver with a space on the END. It first started appearing in the backup error reports stating the file didn't exist. When I finally got round to looking into it I found it was virtually impossible to remove from the server because the API must truncate the name. Couldn't delete through windows explorer, through DOS, through DOS as an 8.3 file, or brute forcing a delete on the whole directory.

Finally hopped onto a linux box and removed it with a simple "rm ._*" over a cifs share ...