topic Re: Remove file in Operating System - Linux

Remove file

juno2 — Fri, 02 May 2003 01:28:43 GMT

there are some strange files in our system , it can't be delete or move by "rm" or "mv" , but it can list by "ll" , how can I delete the file? thx.

Re: Remove file

Stuart Browne — Fri, 02 May 2003 03:52:55 GMT

Start by getting their proper names.

The 'ls' command has a flag '-b' which will show all non printable characters in octal mode. Once you've figured out what their real name is, you can then do some creative things with 'rm' and 'echo' to remove them, for instance:

rm -i `echo -e "funky\033file"`

Failing that, you could always just use 'rm -i' with the appropraite wildcard mask ('rm -i' of course being remove interactivly (say Y/N)).

Re: Remove file

Steven E. Protter — Fri, 02 May 2003 05:17:26 GMT

You could also use the tab key for name completion, so long as the funny characters aren't at the beginning of the name.

SEP

Re: Remove file

Umapathy S — Fri, 02 May 2003 13:16:30 GMT

my way is
ls >tmp.out

now you can see any unprintable char in your file names. Remove the rest and add rm before the filenames and execute the tmp.out.

Its done.

HTH
Umapathy

Re: Remove file

John Poff — Fri, 02 May 2003 13:31:32 GMT

Hi,

Here is one method I have used to remove files with bad filenames. Use the '-i' option on the ls command to get the inode number of the file, and then use the '-inum' option in find to rm the file:

$ ls -li oo*.txt
442825 -rw-r--r-- 1 jpoff users 1102 Sep 12 2002 oops.txt

$ find -inum 442825 -exec rm {} \;

JP