Remove file

[juno2]

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.

[Stuart Browne · Accepted solution]

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)).

[Steven E. Protter]

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

[Umapathy S]

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

[John Poff]

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