Here is a 1997 email to the CCIUG email group that talks about the wrong way to clean up the lost+found directory.
From: "Douglas B. Robinson" Subject: Re: [cciug] Clean up lost+found Sender: owner-cciug@atria.com Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 18:02:15 GMT Steve: At 09:42 AM 5/29/97 -0400, Steve wrote: >You can do a bottom-up element removal, for example >%cleartool find * -depth -exec 'cleartool rmelem $CLEARCASE_PN' > >That way, if you have directory elements in lost+found, you >remove the directory contents before you remove the directory. This is unfortunately the *WRONG* way to go about cleaning up the ClearCase lost+found directory unless you are *ABSOLUTELY* *CERTAIN* that the elements in directories that have migrated to lost+found were *NEVER* linked into directory(ies) that did *NOT* migrate into lost+found. The following sequence may enlighten the audience: cd /vob/foo co -nc . ct mkdir -nc foo ct mkdir -nc foo/foo2 cd foo/foo2 ct mkelem Makefile ci -nc Makefile cd .. ci -nc foo2 cd .. ci -nc . [ let's say that this created version 55 ] co -nc . ct mkdir bar ct rmname foo ct ln .@@/foo/foo2/Makefile bar ci -nc bar . ct rmelem -nc .@@/55/foo [ this will cause foo2 to migrate into lost+found ] At this point, if you were to do a depth first rmelem of the contents of lost+found you'd be very sad since you would lose the Makefile which you had intentionally linked into /vob/foo/bar/Makefile . The proper procedure, after having eliminated all of the checkouts from lost+found (either by tracking down the users or by a judicious use of "cleartool rmview -uuid"), is to: cd lost+found cleartool rmelem -force ./* and cycle on the "rmelem" until there is nothing left in lost+found. If a directory is removed that holds contents and those contents are not linked anywhere else they will migrate into lost+found as the directory is rmelem'd (and hence the need to keep doing the rmelem until the lost+found directory is clear). Sincerely: Doug