What does it mean a red filename shown with black background

bashlsshell

I have a compilation problem, and when I check my lib/ directory I get this output from "ls":

ls output

What the red/black combination mean?

I checked in the output of "dircolors -p" as suggested here (What does it mean for the file name to be shown with red background), but I could not find an answer.

Moreover, what the question marks at the place of permissions/user/size/timestamp mean?

Thanks for your help

Best Answer

What you have there is a dangling symlink, or a symlink pointing to a file or directory which no longer exists.

A symlink itself really has no filesize, because it isn't a file. Symlinks are stored within the inodes themselves, meaning they have no real contents or size, but are instead pointers to other files on the disk.

The output of file libCLHEP-Exceptions-2.1.3.1.a should reveal where it's pointing to.

Related Solutions

Linux Shell – Why ‘ls -a’ Hides Some Directories from Root User

Zsolt, please try these three steps:

cd /

exec bash

/usr/bin/find /you/are/here -ls

It's probably time for fsck... :-(

But before that, you could try (after backing up anything inside somedir):
cd /you/are/here && mkdir somedir.
cd /you/are/here && ln somedir newdir (as root).

Also check mount | egrep -e 'somedir|you|are|here' for any oddities.

Linux – What does it mean for the file name to be shown with red background

The colors of files when viewed in ls (or more specifically ls --color) by system settings. Use dircolors -p to view a whole list of your configuration.

In that output I see:

# Below are the color init strings for the basic file types. A color init
# string consists of one or more of the following numeric codes:
# Attribute codes:
# 00=none 01=bold 04=underscore 05=blink 07=reverse 08=concealed
# Text color codes:
# 30=black 31=red 32=green 33=yellow 34=blue 35=magenta 36=cyan 37=white
# Background color codes:
# 40=black 41=red 42=green 43=yellow 44=blue 45=magenta 46=cyan 47=white

Your example has a red background and white foreground, so I would look for a code with 37 (white) and 41 (red).

$ dircolors -p | grep 37 | grep 41
SETUID 37;41 # file that is setuid (u+s)

And we see that it's setuid (as per Ignacio's previous answer).

Best Answer

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Linux Shell – Why ‘ls -a’ Hides Some Directories from Root User

Linux – What does it mean for the file name to be shown with red background

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