Re: rmdir won't work.

[Bob Proulx]

John Briggs wrote:
> I copied my files to a CD before switching to Linux and after I
> erased everything I put the files back on, but in a write-protected
> file (did it automatically).

You are not giving anyone much to work on with your description.  But
I will assume that the original files were read-only before the copy.
In which case the copy would also be read-only.

> After that, I had the "brilliant" idea of just copying the
> directories and files inside it thinking that they wouldn't be
> write-protected (for some odd reason). Now I realize that they all
> are write-protected and even the rmdir commands and rmdir -r
> [directory] commands work, I've tried all of the combinations and it
> says Permission denied.

Try this:

  chmod -R u+w ./path/to/your/files

That will recursively give the owner of the file write permission.
Since you copied the files you are the owner.  After that you can
delete them.

> This also coincides with another problem, the computer thinks that
> the CDs are being used by Fedora it took a little while and I
> figured out how to eject the CDs in a roundabout fashion.

If you had the CD busy, such as having changed the directory of your
shell to there to browse around with 'ls' then that would do it.  The
filesystem won't allow the disk to be unmounted while it is busy.  So
if you find those shells and cd out of the cdrom it won't be busy and
then you can unmount it.

> Will you tell me anything that will help me delete these
> directories? Refered to this e-mail address when entered [rmdir
> --help]
>
> If you can help, I'd love you. Bye.

Well, you are not really seeing any bugs in any programs.  You are
just needing some education about how things work.  You might try
reading up on the subject here.  It is a reasonably good book on the
subject.

  http://rute.sourceforge.net

Bob