UNIX:Two directories with same name on the same path? [closed]

Question

While I was going through a unix system I found Five, two directories with same name listed on the same path, when I did a ls -Dl

Here is the view, Why I said Five, Two Directories with same name.....

//11/# ls -Dl

total 553

drwxrwxr-x  2 root      root          12288 Dec 20  2010 bin

drwxrwxr-x  2 root      root          16384 Sep 28  2010 bin

drwxrwxr-x 11 root      root           4096 Oct 25 06:49 etc

drwxrwxr-x 11 root      root           8192 May 17 07:40 etc

drwxrwxr-x  3 root      root           4096 Sep 28  2010 qnx4

drwxrwxr-x  4 root      root           4096 Jul 26  2010 qnx4

drwxrwxr--  4 root      root           4096 Sep 28  2010 registry

drwxrwxr-x  4 root      root           4096 Aug 31  2008 registry

drwxrwxr-x 16 root      root           4096 Sep 28  2010 usr

drwxrwxr-x 17 root      root           4096 May 27 03:49 usr

How can this be possible?? what will happen if I cd any one of them, which directory i'll end up in??

There is another way of looking at it, when I did ls -liF the directories listed here came up with different inodes. and were not even symbolic links or anything.???

Please explain this to me??

Answer 1

You should use all these commands to check what are various characters (including hidden ones) in your filename:

printf "[%s]\n" *

printf "%s\n" * | cat -vte

printf "%s\n" * | od -bc

Last one will also dump each dump each character in octal and ascii.

Answer 2

use ls -b, if you found any "\" appended after your folders or files, that should be spaces.