mjhjmtu

System: Raspbian 8 on a Raspberry Pi 3

An errant space in a sudo command caused a bunch of system directories (/bin, /etc, /usr, etc.) to be moved into a subdirectory. I was able to fix it by putting the SD card in my laptop and using a commercial ext4 read/write driver to move the directories back, but since then, I've had this problem:

josh2112@jenna:/etc $ ls -l
<snip/>
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 29 2016 ifplugd
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 12 09:09 ImageMagick-6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 12 09:09 ImageMagick-6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 29 11:15 init
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 29 11:15 init
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 31 14:41 init.d
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Sep 20 2017 initramfs-tools
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Sep 20 2017 initramfs-tools
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1865 May 27 2016 inputrc
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 29 2016 insserv
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 859 Dec 4 2012 insserv.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 859 Dec 4 2012 insserv.conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 20 2017 insserv.conf.d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 29 2016 iproute2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28 Jan 6 2015 issue
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28 Jan 6 2015 issue
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 Jan 6 2015 issue.net
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 Jan 6 2015 issue.net
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 29 2016 kbd
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jul 29 2016 kernel
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 1 15:45 ldap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 95742 Dec 29 11:16 ld.so.cache
<snip/>

josh2112@jenna:/etc $ ls -li issue.net
2097413 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 Jan 6 2015 issue.net

josh2112@jenna:/etc $ ls -lbi issue.net*
2097413 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 Jan 6 2015 issue.net
2097413 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21 Jan 6 2015 issue.net

Notice when I specify the name of the file directly I only see one copy, but when I use a star I see two copies. I printed the inode number to show that they're not two physically separate files?

Some more observations:

• Not everything is duplicated, but it seems to be the majority of files and the majority of directories.


• The duplicates match in every detail, including inode number.


• This occurs in /etc only; the other directories that got moved then moved back appear fine.


• I used the -b code to show any nonprintable chars in the filenames.

Any ideas?

Edit: Still not sure what caused the original issue but e2fsck found & fixed a ton of things, and the duplicate entries seem to be gone.

Edit 2: The duplicates are gone but the original are also gone That's on me, I guess, for blindly answering 'yes' to 400 or so e2fsck-reported errors. Meh, it was time for a reinstall anyway.

I guess the thing to be learned from all this is to use the proper tools for the job. Next time I'll try Tiny Core Linux which provides a "Live CD" type of environment via SD card, loaded into memory, so I can repair the SD card directly on the RPi.