How to remove weird file

[Tonya Underwood]

camintp6:/home/egprdbb/bin # ll | more
total 454
drwx------ 3 root sys 96 Mar 2 15:24 ^V


When I do an ll (without more)

camintp6:/home/egprdbb/bin # ll
total 454
drwx------ 3 root sys 96 Mar 2 15:24


How can I remove this directory?

Thanks!

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Just use rm -R -i (or rmdir -i)

hth,
Hein

[Bob E Campbell]

Always fun to create unprintable file and directory names. Assuming that the directory is empty you should be able to use:

rmdir \cntrl-V

Just type a backslash '\' character that tells the shell to ignore any special properties of the next character. Then hold down the ctrl button and press V.

Good luck!

[Pete Randall]

One of the easiest ways is to use "rmdir -i *", then respond "n" to all those you want to keep.


Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You have control characters embedded in the filename.

Do this but be careful:

cd to parent directory.
rmdir -i *

You will be prompted for each file/directory name. Answer 'y' ONLY to the directory that you want to delete. Answer 'n' to everything else. After your directory has been deleted, you can enter Ctrl-C (or whatever your intr character is set to) to terminate the command.

If the direcory is not empty then you need to do a
rm -r -i *
which will also ask before removing.

[Tonya Underwood]

I had already tried the \cntlv but that did not work...

I did an rmdir -i * and did it that way. Should've thought of that.

THANKS
Tonya

[Tonya Underwood]

camintp6:/home/egprdbb/bin # rm -i -r *
directory : ? (y/n) y
directory /home: ? (y/n) camintp6:/home/egprdbb/bin # ll | more
total 454
drwx------ 3 root sys 96 Mar 2 15:24 ^V


Wait! It did not work. Still there. Then it lists a dir (/home) that is not even in this directory... ??? Confused!

[Bob E Campbell]

Curious. I retried \ctrl-V and it worked most of the time, but sometimes it ended up as a ^J. I love it when computers are random, will look into this in my copious free time (if nobody has that answer)

Answered my own question but still do not understand. Using:

rmdir \^V^V

ended up as a single ^V. I wonder if that was due to the shell editor....

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Yet another way is to find the inode number of the directory and remove by that:

# ls -il
340 drwx------ 3 root sys 96 Mar 2 15:24 ^V

...the inode number is 340. Now:

# cd /path
# find /path -xdev -type d -inum 340 -exec rm -ri {} \;

Note that inode numbers are only unique within a filesystem.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Tonya Underwood]

the find by inum was perfect. Thanks.
Done.