Deleting problem files from VMFS data stores

by bitpushr

Following up from my issues yesterday, I had a bunch of files (old, bad snapshot deltas) that I needed to delete. Problem was, I couldn’t:

/vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/badsnapshots # rm -rf *
rm: cannot remove 'foghorn-000101-ctk.vmdk': Invalid argument
rm: cannot remove 'foghorn-000101-delta.vmdk': Invalid argument

Try as I might, I couldn’t get rid of them. Via lsof I couldn’t see that the files weren’t locked; indeed, I was able to move them, just not delete them. So I cheated, by echoing a character to the file (to verify its sanity and update it’s mtime):

echo "a" > *

Then, rm worked. Victory!

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