duplicate files/directories after running out of space

[Anders Aagaard]

I was syncing the android source code, and ran out of space. After this I logged in and thought "hmm, my unity has reset". I looked in ~/Documents, and it was empty. ~/Desktop... also empty. Then I thought hmm, home must not have mounted, but some files in my home directory was there.

After looking at it for a while I realized a lot of files and directories were duplicated. ls -l found two Desktop directories, two Documents, two .dbus/.config/.local etc. I had backups, so I thought what the hell and did rm -rf .config && ls .config. It worked, my original .config directory was there and was accessable. I used the attached python script to find and clean up the duplicate entries. This was at work so I was in a hurry to fix it, so I wasn't able to grab too much information about the problem.

Note that when I did ls -l I'd find two identical files, including datestamp and file size.
To download the android source code one uses a tool called repo, and repo downloads a lot of git trees in parallel. So there was a lot of threads trying to sync data to the drive at once.
This is on a standard set up ecryptfs in ubuntu. /home is on ext4, I fsck'ed the drive -f and found no issues before I ran the script to clean it up.
I was running kernel 3.4.2-quantal from kernel ppa when this happened.