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Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:00:29 -0300 (ADT)
From: "A. Wright" <andrew@qemg.org>
To: Andrea Venturoli <ml@netfence.it>
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Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Strange filesystem problems
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On Wed, 21 Jul 2010, Andrea Venturoli wrote:

> Let's say I have directory "foo"; under "foo" I have "bar" which keeps
> thousands of files (in several subdirectories).
>
> I do:
>
> %cd /xyzzy/foo
> %pwd
> xyzzy/foo
> %rm -fR bar
> %pwd
> pwd: .: Permission denied

At this point, I would suspect that you may have the UCHG flag
set.  What do:
 	ls -lod /xyzzy/foo/bar
and
 	ls -lo /xyzzy/foo/bar
say?

Check the chflags(1) man page for some descriptions and also how
to change/remove the flags if present.