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Diary of a Network Administrator: Julia Roberts and COM1 Folders

Mar 14, 2003

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Deleting is not Easy

I try DIR /X to get a listing of the directory structure with the 8.3 names. Eureka! I can see the COM1 folder as COM1~1. Can I access and delete it now? Nope. Still Access Denied. MORON is smarter than I thought.

Back to Windows Explorer. I took ownership and assigned the local Administrators group Full Control to the parent folder, Tagged. I chose the option to reset permissions on all child objects. Sounds good, right? Wrong. Windows can't traverse the folders to assign Full Control to COM1.

Another cup of coffee later, I'm digging out some POSIX tools myself. There are a host of POSIX tools in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. Here are the tools I used in my attempt to delete these folders:

chmod—This tool is like ATTRIB in DOS. It's used to change the access type to the folder, not necessarily the permission.
chown—This tool is used to change the owner of an object. I had high hopes here.
ls—This tool is like the DIR command; it lists the contents of a directory.
rm—This tool is like the DEL command. It has some switches to delete files and directories. I couldn't wait to get to use this one.
rmdir—This tool deletes directories. I was hoping to use this one right away.

Unfortunately, none of these tools did much good to gain access to the COM1 folder. I had expectations of RM.EXE. This bad boy allows you to remove directories with POSIX commands. In POSIX, we don't use all the frilly colons and backslashes. C:\Tagged\By\MORON becomes C/Tagged/By/MORON. Specifically, with RM.EXE, it's rm –r //C/Tagged/By/Moron to delete the whole directory structure. But (sigh) that COM1 folder won't go away. Next, I try rm –r //C/Tagged/By/Moron/COM1~1, but it's back to the Access Denied message. Grrr.

Could it be that the folder is locked because another process is accessing the folder? I doubted it, but I was having little luck. I fired up a great tool from the fine folks at www.sysinternals.com called Process Explorer. This tool enables you to see what processes are running and the related resources in use. As fine as the tool is, it didn't reveal any open processes on the COM1 folder. Now I was getting mad.

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