Why is 'ls' showing question marks for a file's details?

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1

I ran the ‘find’ command to search for a driver file.

I’m running as root user, and it shows “Permission denied” for a couple of files (actually, sub-directories).
Seems odd, so I ran a ‘ll’ (‘ls’) for the parent sub-directory (1000 is my acct).

I have never seen this before:
Those two files (sub-dirs) have “?” for their various column entries.

Why in the world is ‘ls’ showing question marks??
( for ‘doc’ and ‘gvfs’ … this is on my Leap 15.6 system )

mach:/ # find . -name iHD_drv* -ls
[ ... ]
find: ‘./run/user/1000/doc’: Permission denied
find: ‘./run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied
[ ... ]

mach:/ #
mach:/ # ll /run/user/1000/
ls: cannot access '/run/user/1000/doc': Permission denied
ls: cannot access '/run/user/1000/gvfs': Permission denied
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 myswtest users  72 Sep 14 10:06 KSMserver__0
srw-rw-rw- 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 09:09 bus
drwx------ 3 myswtest users  60 Sep 14 09:09 dbus-1
drwx------ 2 myswtest users  60 Sep 14 09:12 dconf
d????????? ? ?        ?       ?            ? doc
srw------- 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 09:09 drkonqi-coredump-launcher
drwx------ 2 myswtest users 120 Sep 14 10:06 gnupg
d????????? ? ?        ?       ?            ? gvfs
drwx------ 2 myswtest users  40 Sep 14 09:09 gvfsd
-rw------- 1 myswtest users 318 Sep 14 10:06 iceauth_NvsvCz
-rw------- 1 myswtest users 314 Sep 14 09:41 iceauth_dIWspm
srwxr-xr-x 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 10:06 kwallet5.socket
srw-rw-rw- 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 09:09 pipewire-0
srw-rw-rw- 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 09:09 pipewire-0-manager
-rw-r----- 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 09:12 pipewire-0-manager.lock
-rw-r----- 1 myswtest users   0 Sep 14 09:12 pipewire-0.lock
drwx------ 2 myswtest users  80 Sep 14 10:06 pulse
drwxr-xr-x 7 myswtest users 180 Sep 14 10:06 systemd
mach:/ #
2

It’s a fuse mount… mount | grep run

3

Interesting. Thanks for the quick response Malcolm :+1:

myswtest@mach:~> mount | grep run
[ ... snipped ... ]

tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1618856k,nr_inodes=404714,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=100,inode64)
portal on /run/user/1000/doc type fuse.portal (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=100)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=100)
myswtest@mach:~>

So, it’s a “Filesystem in Userspace” … a way to attach a virtual filesystem where code runs in user-space vs in the OS kernel.

I thought maybe I had some file corruption.

1 Like
4

FUSE mounts indeed gives a lot of ghastly scary :ghost: :dizzy_face: moments, because if just a single file operation is unimplemented it will return errors such as “corrupted”, “??” or input/output err.

5

I don’t doubt it … fortunately, after all these years with Linux, I’ve experienced it.

And of course, oddly … I was simply running the ‘find’ command to find a file completely unrelated :slight_smile:

6

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