On Sep 9, 2004, at 6:13 PM, Greg wrote:

What the heck is going on... see below!

madrid:/Volumes/haza root# ls -lt /Volumes/haza/cstar/Public/Special/
total 16
-rwxr-xr-x  1 admin  staff     6148 24 Jul  2002 .DS_Store
drwxrwxrwx  2 admin  apple_sw    68  3 Jul  2002 ????

I initially got the impression that the question marks were your way of
obscuring sensitive information that should not be disclosed outside
your
company.  Upon further thinking, I realized that they are the result of
the -q option of the 'ls' command, which is a default in the Mac OS X
'ls' command (unlike in AIX and Solaris, which threw me off (every Unix
is different)). The -q option helps reveal binary garbage in the name
of file system objects.  I doubt that this situation has anything to do
with Unicode, but you may want to look at that same area through the
Finder, and see if it makes any sense of it.  It's possible that the
owner of this system needs to do some fixit work to clean up its act.
(I'd strongly recommend Norton Utilities or the like to further help
straighten out this system.)

The binary file system stuff may or may not be inciting the ANS message
situation, but it is certainly the case that backing up that system in
its current condition may be a waste of time.

In my experience, every Windows or Mac should periodically be put
through an appropriate file system and disk analysis to uncover
structural problems and/or file irregularities, which can just get
worse over time, and will
inevitably cause problems, as you find now.

   Richard Sims