For a few weeks now I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to delete this one particular file. As root I can, but my shell script runs as a different user. So I go run ls -la and it's not there. However, if I call it as a parameter, it shows up! Sure enough, the owner is root, hence I'm not able to delete.

Notice, 6535 is missing ...

[root@server]# ls -la 653*
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn  24002 Mar 26 01:00 653
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   7114 Mar 26 01:01 6530
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   8653 Mar 26 01:01 6531
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   6836 Mar 26 01:01 6532
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   3308 Mar 26 01:01 6533
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   3918 Mar 26 01:01 6534
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   3237 Mar 26 01:01 6536
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn   3195 Mar 26 01:01 6537
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn  27725 Mar 26 01:01 6538
-rw-rw-r--  1 svn svn 263473 Mar 26 01:01 6539

Now it shows up if you call it directly.

[root@server]# ls -la 6535
-rw-rw-r--  1 root root 3486 Mar 26 01:01 6535