[suchoudh]

sometime back i downloaded a phrack zip on my ubuntu and noticed it had some special character which did not allow me to delete the files once unzipped.

perhaps some safety measure. i am used to only drwxrwxrwx or lrwxrwxrwx on dirs and files never seen srwx.....

Can someone pls point me to some doc that explains how to deal with it.

[jo-lund]

Sounds to me like the sticky bit is set on the directory and you are not the owner. If this is set on a directory, then you can't delete files inside this directory unless you are the owner (of the files or the directory) or root. Having write permisson is not enough. This makes directories like for example tmp a bit more secure.

[theblazehen]

That sounds like a socket, are you sure you downloaded a zip and not a tar? And that you didn't extract it as root / another user?

You should check the permissions on it, you may need to chown it to your user, or just remove it as root