deleting directories with ??? in name

Walter walterk1 at earthlink.net
Mon Mar 15 16:10:52 PST 2004


Erik Trulsson wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 03:51:37PM -0800, Derrick Ryalls wrote:
> 
>>>I've tried lynx, but it did not display the files.
>>>I tried emacs, but I was only able to rename two of the 
>>>directories to other names I could delete; the other two gave 
>>>me an error of illegal character. I tried 'rm -i -- ?*' but 
>>>it didn't find the files. I tried 'find . -inum 146 -delete' 
>>>but while it gave no error message, the files/directories remain.
>>>
>>>Help!  How do I delete these odd directories?
>>>Please CC me in your response as I'm not currently
>>>subscribed to the List.
>>>
>>
>>#mkdir dir?me
>>#rmdir dir\?me
> 
> 
> That assumes that filenames actually contain questionmarks.
> ls(1) by default displays all unprintable characters as question marks.
> To see what the filenames actually are use 'ls -aB'.
> 
> To delete files with strange names you can always do a 'rm -i *' and
> answer 'y' only for the weird files.

'rm -i *' returns "no match"
'ls -aB' shows me the file names, but even after carefully typing in what
  it shows me in an 'rm' command (name in quotes) says not found.
There are \216, \235, \237, and \377 characters in the names, if
this matters.
Thanks.



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list