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

[mbt at naunetcorp.com (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