[Fwd: Re: deleting directories with ??? in name]

[Walter]

Matthew Seaman wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 07:07:46PM -0800, Chris Pressey wrote:
> 
> 
>>That wouldn't explain why 'rm -i *' returned 'no match', though.
> 
> 
> Just to eliminate the obvious: did these weird filenames begin with a
> '.'?  Shell globbing treats file names with a leading period
> specially. You'ld have to do:
> 
>     % ls -d .*
> 
> to get a listing of those files, and:
> 
>     % rm -ri .[^.]* 
> 
> to delete them.  Note the extra effort taken to avoid matching the
> special names '.' and '..' -- doing a recursive delete of '..' is a
> real foot-shooting exercise.
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew
> 

I don't remember whether the files had leading dots or not.  Sorry.
But I'll keep this method in mind if it happens again.  Thanks.