*BSD News Article 20658


Return to BSD News archive

Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk!ist!rb
From: rb@ist.co.uk (Bob Bishop)
Subject: Re: Panic with deleted current directory...
Message-ID: <1993Sep8.094052.21295@ist.co.uk>
Organization: Imperial Software Technology Ltd
References: <CCqJKM.DD8@sugar.NeoSoft.COM>
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1993 09:40:52 GMT
Lines: 24

From article <CCqJKM.DD8@sugar.NeoSoft.COM>, by peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva):
> 386BSD, pk0.2.4. I was working in two windows under screen, and accidentally
> deleted the directory that was the current directory for another window.
> As soon as I did something that accessed '.' in the other window, the system
> panicked.
> 
> I wasn't working on the console (or even at home)at the time, so I only have
> a report of the panic. Is this a known problem? It's non-optimal behaviour.
> -- 
> Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
>  `-_-'   Hefur thu fadhmadh ulfinn i dag?
>   'U`    
> "Det er min ledsager, det er ikke drikkepenge."

I had what may be a similar problem dicking around with
fchdir(2). If you remove a directory (empty, obviously) while
it's open, it goes into a limbo state where the inode exists
but the directory contains no entries (not even `.' and `..').
Attempting to create a file in such a directory (use fchdir()
to get there) results, on 386BSD/pk0.2.3 in:
panic: wdir: compact1
because the create code doesn't spot this special case.

I'll post a fix when I get a minute...