A folder with d?????????? in the ls -l

Question

I am running the EDG-12.2.1-Trn (CentOS 6.6 64-bit) VM on Virtual Box. This is the Oracle Database VM.

When I try sharing a folder, through VirtualBox, it shares successfully (automatically), and there is a shortcut on the desktop too.

When I run the shortcut, it says there is a permissions error. I looked in the terminal, and saw that it looks like this:

[root@edqtrn media]# ls -l
ls: cannot access sf_my_share: Protocol error
total 14
drwxrwx---. 2 root   vboxsf   4096 Dec  2  2014 sf_av_share
drwxrwx---. 2 root   vboxsf   4096 Jan 23  2015 sf_data
drwxrwx---. 2 root   vboxsf   4096 Dec  2  2014 sf_share
d?????????? ? ?      ?           ?            ? sf_my_share
dr-xr-xr-x  6 oracle oinstall 2048 Mar  4 11:45 VBOXADDITIONS_5.0.16_105871
[root@edqtrn media]# 

Why are there ? in the directory listing?

sf_my_share is the folder I want to share and read the files in it. I have shared it properly in VirtualBox (i.e. Devices > Shared Folders > Shared Folders Settings > Added a folder in: Machine = share, Folders = C:\temp\my_share\, Auto-mount = Yes and Access = Full - Read Only is not set).

Answer 1

Something similar happened to me once after I changed the credentials of the user I used to authenticate and mount the directory. The solution that worked for me was to unmount the folder:

sudo umount /folder_path
mount -a

Answer 2

Check the permissions of your sf_my_share directory.
If you have read but not execute permissions on this directory, then you have enough rights to list the files in that directory, but you can't actually use these files or get more detailed information about them.

Answer 3

Check the filesystem that hosts your sf_my_share directory. Seem like ls can't stat this directory, may be because of the filesystem's mount options

Answer 4

If you have Make Permanent option in the shared folder option, it can cause this. I had this problem once in the past and then did an unmount and deselect Make permanent and left only Auto mount and never came across this error at all.

Answer 5

It definitely looks like it could have been a permissions or a network issue. But on my last note, I mentioned that:

My Network adapter, in the Settings on VBox, was set to NAT. As soon as I changed it to Bridged, then restarted the VM, it worked and didn't show the ?'s

So this seemed to have fixed it.

I haven't seen this since, so it had to have been my network adapter.

Answer 6

I got the same thing with all the ????????s on my node_modules folder. I was using it in PowerShell and in WSL Ubuntu at about the same time and 'yarn install' kept failing with a permission error so I thought it was a proxy/network sort of thing.

Using the info in the other answers I tried closing down all my WSL Ubuntu instances and then bringing one back up. I left PowerShell window running.

And it worked. The node_modules folder disappeared in WSL and in PowerShell. Then 'yarn install' in PowerShell succeeded.

BTW - If you want to do this two ways to use NPM, I haven't found a way for it to work in both at once. I have to erase node_modules and redo the install in the one I want to work in today. Then it will work.

Answer 7

Cleared this by doing a umount on the specific mount, then mount -a to remount everything in /etc/fstab.