Every once in a while, either a user somehow comes up with a file with funky characters, or I create one by accident. When displayed through a 'ls', the non-printable characters are displayed with "?"s. The "?"s are not literal question marks, but just represent an unprintable character.
Without using shell meta characters (*), C, perl, loops, find or anything other than just the rm command, I haven't been able to figure out how to remove this file. There has to be a way to get rid of it with rm, but I have had no such luck with it so far by quoting, escaping, using "--", "./" or any other magic I can think of. I've had the same results on woody x86, woody sparc, woody ppc, yellow dog 2.2(ppc), redhat 7.2 x86, and solaris 8 sparc. Some suggestions I have received so far are to delete it with rm -i *, find -exec, by using the inode number (find --inum), or through the use of a file browser (ick!). These methods work, but I would really like to find the proper way to create the string to pass rm on the command line. There has to be some way of doing it - or are there certain filenames that cannot be produced on the command line and/ or fed to rm? The example below should illustrate my problem pretty well: valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 valites valites 0 Sep 17 10:45 ?$?? valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ ls -l | od -c 0000000 t o t a l 0 \n - r w - r - - r 0000020 - - 1 v a l i t e s 0000040 v a l i t e s 0000060 0 S e p 1 7 1 0 : 4 5 0000100 214 $ 255 373 \n 0000105 valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ ls -b \214$\255\373 valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm -i * #<- don't want to use this... rm: remove `\214$\255\373'? n valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm \214$\255\373 rm: cannot remove `214$255373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm \214\$\255\373 rm: cannot remove `214$255373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm '\214$\255\373' rm: cannot remove `\\214$\\255\\373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm '\214\$\255\373' rm: cannot remove `\\214\\$\\255\\373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm "\214$\255\373" rm: cannot remove `\\214$\\255\\373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm "\214\$\255\373" rm: cannot remove `\\214$\\255\\373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ rm ./\214\$\255\373 rm: cannot remove `./214$255373': No such file or directory valites@sunfish:/tmp/file$ Any help is appreciated ahead of time! -Mark >--))> >--))> Mark T. Valites Unix Systems Analyst 1 College Circle - 124b1 South Hall SUNY Geneseo Geneseo, NY 14454 585-245-5577 585-259-3471 (Cell) 585-245-5579 (Fax) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
