Undeletable ghostly file

okay, I'm at a loss here so I'm calling in for help.
I have a bunch of files coming from an rsync. they land on my (ext3) filesystem as an automated incremental rotating backup. now I want to delete some of the older backups but some files just won't go.
here's the fun:
$ ls -loai
ls: cannot access liste témoins.htm: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access acide acétique glacial.pdf: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access tamis moléculaire.pdf: No such file or directory
total 20
1974598 drwxr-xr-x 2 lloeki 16384 2008-10-15 11:58 .
1974596 drwxr-xr-x 3 lloeki 4096 2008-10-15 11:58 ..
1974960 -????????? ? ? ? ? acide acétique glacial.pdf
1975007 -????????? ? ? ? ? liste témoins.htm
1975022 -????????? ? ? ? ? tamis moléculaire.pdf
now you know, this is a nice tux ghost I have here.
of course rm -f/unlink/whatever fails, since the file does not "exists".
so I guess it's a broken inode in the directory listing. corrupt fs? e2fsck -f doesn't give a damn and reports pristine fs.
now I just can't believe there's no f*cking manual way to unconditionally remove an entry from a directory i.e without checking that the inode points to anything.
this corruption seems tied to that rsync scripty stuff I made up as I don't see it coming up anywhere else, but regularly coming up with only common point being rsync, so I bet it's safe for me to just abuse the fs and remove the entry form the directory table.
any ext2 guru care to give a hand?
EDIT: thinking of it, it might just be because I'm using --link-dest and --delete-during together. then there's some race condition or something that makes a directory entry end up without content.
does no fix my stuff but hey, that makes sense.
Last edited by lloeki (2008-10-23 22:21:02)

I just wanted to say that we can rule out encoding problems here. I found this thread googling for the same problem over which I stumbled yesterday when I saw a bunch of files inside my home directory which were created by Azureus.
$ ls -la
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 blah blah 24576 2008-10-25 20:14 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 blah blah 4096 2008-10-25 20:13 ..
?--------- ? ?      ?          ?                ? 156BEF2D68A2DAD4AD296452C6FCFF2FAA1D583E.dat
?--------- ? ?      ?          ?                ? 16B59E3EA2763132F8D23B575D3EEB8C96CE2DF4.dat
?--------- ? ?      ?          ?                ? 188A63CB3B973290CAE416A357B00446197A794F.dat
The volume is ext3 formatted and all "ghostly" files have a similar name, i.e. there are no umlauts or other special characters involved. Just wanted to say that so it might make tracking down the problem somewhat easier.
Last edited by larmeh (2008-10-26 06:12:32)

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