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I got a strange error the other day. Attempting to rm -rf nav/ a directory threw "not a directory", but trying to rm nav errored with "is a directory".

How is this possible?

not a directory
(source: zastica.com)

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  • Well, what is it, then? What's "ls -l nav" show?
    – Rob F
    Oct 12, 2009 at 16:23

1 Answer 1

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You may have some filesystem corruption. Notice the 1 between the permission and the owner? That's the number of links to the directory inode. A directory should normally have a minimum of two, because it is linked to by the parent directory, and by itself (the . entry it contains). I would guess there is some corruption and your nav directory does not contain a . entry. Can you get anything with ls -la nav?

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  • The file/directory is already gone unfortunately, so I can't ls -la nav.
    – davethegr8
    Oct 12, 2009 at 17:04

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