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

[Chris Pressey]

On 15 Mar 2004 20:26:12 -0500
Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org> wrote:

> Walter <walterk1 at earthlink.net> writes:
> 
> > I managed to delete the files by recreating the directory.
> > 
> > Not to seem ungrateful, but isn't it a Bad Thing that it
> > is not straightforeward to delete any file on the system
> > (as root, and thwarted merely because of the characters in
> > the name of the file/directory)?  I'm not in a position to
> > mangle lynx, but oughtn't it to be able to zap ANY file
> > regardless of its name? (emacs is obtuse to me.) Is this
> > worthy of a PR?  Or are there other ways to kill a
> > malconforming file?  Why should an annonomous FTP user
> > be able to create a directory tree that the root account
> > of the machine can't traverse and delete normally? (Sigh.)
> 
> It sounds like you're just unfamiliar with shell quoting rules.

That wouldn't explain why 'rm -i *' returned 'no match', though.

I think it's more likely that (for whatever reason) the FTP server is
allowing files to be created with extremely funky filenames - possibly
embedded NULs?  I wouldn't have thought this was possible with open(2)
or fopen(3) - and I wouldn't think that an FTP server would use some
other method of creating a file...

Walter, out of curiousity, what FTP server were you running, and (if you
remember) what was the exact output of ls -aB ?

-Chris