what does it mean a red filename shown with black background?

I have a compilation problem, and when I check my lib/ directory I get this output from "ls":

ls output

What the red/black combination mean?

I checked in the output of "dircolors -p" as suggested here (What does it mean for the file name to be shown with red background), but I could not find an answer.

Moreover, what the question marks at the place of permissions/user/size/timestamp mean?

Thanks for your help

2 Answers

What you have there is a dangling symlink, or a symlink pointing to a file or directory which no longer exists.

A symlink itself really has no filesize, because it isn't a file. Symlinks are stored within the inodes themselves, meaning they have no real contents or size, but are instead pointers to other files on the disk.

The output of file libCLHEP-Exceptions-2.1.3.1.a should reveal where it's pointing to.

3

At the first look, it does look like a broken link, but since it is supposed to be a regular file, it might be a file system corruption. Try to do a fsck on the file system and then try to delete this file if it is still there.

1

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