IFS gotcha - potential disaster

[Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't know if this has happened to anyone else, but it was a little 
messy. Somehow we got a file in the root (/) of our system, named *.* - 
perhaps as the destination of some kind of copy command.

Anyway, when clicking, in Ops Nav, on the "root" share we have, only that 
"file" showed up. Of course, if I did a WRKLNK '/*.*', all the files with a 
period somewhere in the name appeared, including this one.

In QShell, ls ??? (for 3-character names) displayed this file, as well as 
the directories with 3-letter names, such as "tmp" and "usr", and their 
subtrees - fortunately there is not much in these right now.

This is in the category of deleting files with invalid characters in the name.

Also, I opened that file, in Windows, with TextPad. What I got was the 
other 5 files in the root. This is when I got worried.

The problem is, if I try to delete this file in Windows Explorer, I would 
also be trying to delete QSYS.LIB - note the period in the middle of the 
name - and QFileSvr.400 - not my idea of a good time. And any files in root 
that had a period in the name - 5 in this case.

But iSeries is a little safer, as you cannot delete a non-empty directory 
by the normal default parameters of RMVDIR. And a 4 in WRKLNK on this file 
would probably execute RMVLNK, not RMVDIR. But I was not convinced of this.

QShell is even better, since the "rm" command definitely will not remove 
directories.

So I first moved the stream files I wanted to keep into a new directory, 
leaving only *.* in the root. Then I started QShell and ran

rm ???

to remove only files with 3-character names, and this worked.

Now everything shows up in Ops Nav. And I put the other files back to the 
root. And QSYS.LIB is still here.

Whew!

Vern