[ale] How can I delete links that can't be seen by stat?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 12/11/2012 01:00 PM, James Sumners wrote:
> In the screenshot, you'll see a list of links that have no properties
> whatsoever according to `ls`. These are supposed to be hard links.
>
> Here's the scenario:
>
> I have an NFS mount where I send nightly backups. These nightly
> backups use a common "full backup" and a series of differential
> backups. I'm using rsync to do this. At some point, the nightly
> backups failed due to low disk space and got out-of-sync. So I'm
> removing old backups and starting anew. However, after deleting the
> first few "old" backups I encountered this problem where `rm` can't
> remove these files since it can't lstat() them.
>
> Anyone know how I can delete these links?

Is this system the host filesystem, or the filesystem mounted via NFS?

If the latter, I would take a look at the files themselves, using a 
shell session on the NFS server.  Perhaps they don't exist anymore, but 
NFS doesn't remember deleting them or something?  Or perhaps Something 
Bad Happened™ to the backing filesystem and the files look the same there.

If _that_ happened, then the filesystem should be reinitialized and its 
contents restored from a backup, after taking an image of it to try to 
investigate WTF went wrong.

A whole lotta "if"s.  More information would be useful... :-)

	--- Mike