[wplug] Strange directory/behavior

[Bob Schmertz]

Gentgeen incurred the wrath of Bob on Aug 31, by saying

>Today, when I did a 'ls' I found that I had a directory with the name
>'?' in my home directory (/home/kevin/?/).  Yes, just the question mark
>symbol. When I view my home directory using a GUI (either an Open File
>dialog or with a file manager) it shows up as an empty square.  

Some shell magic that could help you:

find . -regex ./. -maxdepth 1

should hopefully find only that file (the maxdepth part is actuall not 
necessary in this case where the regex has just three characters).  
Then, with backquotes, you could, for example, cd to this file, thus:

cd `find . -regex ./. -maxdepth 1`

>
>I have also lost a few files while working with AbiWord.  I had mounted
>my home directory via samba on my winXP machine at work.  Using MS Word,
>I edited and then printed a document.  When I got home, I found that the
>file was empty.

Could you describe for us what you saw or did that made you say it was 
'empty'?  For me a file being empty means the file size is 0.

>The same thing happened again when I used AbiWord (via
>VNC) at home with another file.  I opened it, worked on it, saved it,
>then when I reopened (sp?) it, it was blank.

>From how you describe it, it sort of sounds like it is not finding the 
file you saved, so it is instead creating a fresh new file (or buffer -- 
not a file until you save it).

>My questions are: 
>  -What is this new directory?  

Don't know :-)

>  -Does anyone think that the two things are related?  

I have no experience with Samba, but that said, it sort of sounds like 
Samba is not talking to your filesystem right.  This could certainly 
result in files not ending up where they're supposed to be, with names 
that would normally not appear on your filesystem.  So, in my naivete, I 
could imagine a scenario where you edit the files over Samba, it creates 
a directory (well, that's the part I have a little trouble with), and 
gives the file a name made up of garbage characters.  Then again, I'm 
not sure how well I've understood you.

-- 
Cheers,
Bob Schmertz