[SOLVED] Help Removing a file

[br0ken]

A co-worker (I work in IT at an answering service) decided to play a little prank on me and placed a big file (named BIG_FILE ironically) in my home directory. The file is 1TB in size even though the HDD on the computer is only 200GB. I cannot rm the file as myself or as root. root is not able to do anything to the file such as chown, etc. Any suggestions would be very helpful.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Don't know what's up with it.

Maybe you can su to root and try deleting it like this:

rm -f /path/to/BIG_FILE

If that doesn't work, try downloading the PartedMagic LiveCD, boot with it, then navigate to the file and try deleting it that way.

Let us know how it goes.

[wowbag1]

Hi,
So are you saying that the file is not as it seems - if it is 1TB it cannot be on the HDD. So is it a corupted file or a link, can you re-name it and then delete it. Or can you unlink to it or even link to it and then delete it? What are the default permissions?

wowbag1

[br0ken]

well i figured it out... it was a sparse file which is why it was saying it was larger than the entire hard drive..

dd if=/dev/zero of=BIG_FILE bs=1 count=1 seek=1024G

that will give you a seemingly 1 terabyte file named BIG_FILE.. and i could not move it, rename it, anything.. thats because it was immutable.. even root can't delete it or anything until the attributes are changed

chattr -i BIG_FILE

makes it able to be deleted, etc.. quite interesting i think lol
but from what i understand, the immutable attribute only works on ext2 filesystems