From the Department of Insane Hacks

On Halloween, Windows played a dirty Trick on me, so I gave myself a great Treat: I blew Windwoes to hell and installed Debian. Life has been wonderful ever since — but that’s not what this story is about.

Because I like playing World of Tanks, I ended up installing Windows again, but only as a slave chained in a dark little dungeon that I could access when I damn well felt like it. One day, when I had booted into my little slave Windows to play, I wanted to do something Internettish. I opened the portable version of Firefox that was in a shared NTFS partition. Windows blue-screened out.

Something in that portable ffx was deadly. It may have come from an attempt to run it in Wine, or from an update done through ‘nix. At ay rate, it was thoroughly poisoned. I couldn’t run it, couldn’t delete the cache, couldn’t poke my nose into it at all without crashing Windoze. After three bluescreens, I stopped trying. It didn’t knock the virtual Windows over, so I tried to get rid of it from that.

Using Free Commander’s wipe function, I erased — oops, not quite all of it. The “Some files could not be deleted” dialog popped up. I looked. All that was left was a nested directory with NO FILES IN IT. OK, I step away from Windows and take a look with Nautilus. Yep, empty. But I still can’t delete it because it is “not empty.” Bash, what do you see? Nada. No files. It’s EMPTY. No command shows anything, deletes anything, does anything. It is empty, but it is “not empty.” I can even rename the top dir (from “Firefox” to “poison”), but I can’t delete anything!

I get mad. OK, you little SOB, you’re not empty — let’s see what happens if I put a real, visible file in you. Copy, paste. Ha.

Then I up-dir to the root of this odd family of not-emptines and…DELETE the whole shebang. No complaints. It’s gone.

I suspect a wee fukup in the Master File Table. Wottever, it’s just another one of those crazy hax where doing *something* shakes something loose and whothehell cares, it works.

The late perp:
/media/(UUID)/progs/poison/Data/profile/safebrowsing