Hi guys,
I'm back again with a problem:
I'm trying to remove some files which indeed do not exist anymore, let me explain:
a user of my staff has in his dumpster (the irix trashbin) some files which have been removed (i think trashed and deleted), but someway they have not been removed, so when i try to clean his dumpster even if in root mode and even using strong commands like rm -rf * in this directory, there is an error which freezes the computer, in an continuous output like:

Cannot access pippo.ang : No such file or directory

This results in a big problem because this stupid directory in the dumpster, blocks also a backup utility which uses rsync protocol and because of this error goes deep throughout a infinitive loop: rsync cannot find a file which has computed to be but is not more there.

The only think which worked was to move this directory outside the usr one using mv -fi. But also in this way, after moving that directory, it is no more possible to delete it.

Is there anyone there who knows what to do in a case like this (without formatting the disk)?
Many thanks!

Well, this sure sounds like a disk error (though I've never used IRIX).

If you can, umount the disk and run /sbin/fsck on it.
Alternately, note that fsck is often run as part of the boot sequence of other unixen--if that's true of your system, have you rebooted since the problem started? If not, maybe rebooting will fix it.

One more thing: is there a chance that some process has those files open? If you have the 'lsof' command, you can use it to see.

I will try that, thank you!

Yep, it was an hardware error,
and the only thing to do was to change it...
I've also realized it was a 1992 HD!!!