Can't delete a folder

[Acternaweb]

I have a script on my sever that I no longer want. However, I get a "you do not have permission" error. I set the folder to 777, and 644 and still no luck.

Any ideas?

[sugarkane]

Did you install the script yourself? If so setting the both the script and the folder it resides in to 755 should let you delete it.

If it's a preinstalled script you might not have permissions to write to it or delete it, in which case you'll have to ask your host.

[Acternaweb]

I uploaded it myself and now can't remove it.

[Air]

Does the host provide an interface to your files? try deleting it through that if they do. Another option is to use a script to delete the directory, sometimes the GID gets messed up if a script ever wrote to that directory.

<added>if you are using an FTP client and have shell access, you might want to try using the shell instead of the FTP client</added>

[Acternaweb]

Unfortunately, I do not have the ability to telenet. I can only use ftp (cute ftp). There is not a ISP provided interface either.

[idiotgirl]

I had a kind of problem after I discovered my host's sys admin put someone else's files in my cgi-bin (yikes!). I could not delete this weird file and had no idea what it was. It had no extension to the file name, either. Just a long list of garbage characters (I guess *nix has a max of 255?). I was able to delete it by renaming it to:

foo.txt

and CHMOD'ing it to 666 using WS_FTP.

It was a simple solution. It might not work for everyone, or in your case. If you haven't tried it already, it might work.

Idiotgirl

[Acternaweb]

It worked !!! Thanks. That is a great trick. What does foo.txt mean?

[idiotgirl]

If you look around, any time someone means "some name that I just made up" they use 'foo'. I don't know what unwritten law of webmastering and scripting this follows, but 'foo' seems to be the all-time favorite.

Apparently I slept through that meeting, too.

By the way - any name.txt you would have renamed it probably would have worked. Keeping it to a .txt extension is usually safe, since you were only renaming it to delete it, anyway.

If you have a problem deleting the folder, sometimes ftp'ing a folder with the same name to replace the botched one (and then deleting it if it's empty) will work, too. Depends on the type of error you were getting.

Glad it worked.

Idiotgirl

[Macguru]

>I don't know what unwritten law of webmastering and scripting this follows, but 'foo' seems to be the all-time favorite.

The origins of "foo", just another nugget I found right here.

[webmasterworld.com...]

You would be surprised looking for "The origins of Foo" with Google and Altavista! ;)

[idiotgirl]

Aha. So by that rationale, to discover a file that you had corrupted, or had otherwise caused to function properly that file could be considered: foo-bar'd, by Naval standards. As a reference, on the other hand, that file might be generically referred to as foo.txt (.cgi, .gif, .pl, etc.), or your domain may be casually given as www.foo.com.

"foo" is short and sweet. It works.

When I first began working with Perl scripts the whole "foo" thing caused me great distress. I wondered why everything had to be referred to as "foo", when it would flow much more appropriately as:

usr/home/cgi-bin/news/news.pl

and actually make some sense to me at the time. I thought, as a newbie, it would be far easier to follow if someone took the time to use a real, pertinent name instead of foo everyplace. It seemed almost arrogance on the scripter's part to hope a newbie would readily follow just what should replace foo.

Since those days, I made it a practice when writing my own Perl scripts to never refer to anything as foo, and avoid foo like the plague, as it brought back memories of vagueness and confusion... though since I have surely foo-bar'd many on my own ;)

Idiotgirl