Delete file with broken name

Question

I've somehow created a file that I can not seem to figure out how to delete via CLI.

$ ls -alF
total 8195
-rw-r--r--+ 1 me             my_group           0 Jul 19 14:10 ''$'\r'
drwxrwx---+ 1 system         system             0 Nov 17 14:58  ./
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 system         system             0 Jul 17 15:40  ../
...

The first line item here I can not seem to find the correct escape sequence to be able to delete.

Attempting to grep this entry does not even work properly:

$ ls -alF | head -n2
total 8195
-rw-r--r--+ 1 me             my_group           0 Jul 19 14:10

Note that when grepping / using other pipe'd commands, I can never see the name of the file.

this is a Cygwin wrapped Win10 environment

Related: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/28983/117549 – Jeff Schaller Nov 17 '17 at 20:11 — Jeff Schaller, Nov 17 '17 at 20:11

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 17 '17 at 20:10

3

Two suggestions:

Run ls -li to get the inode, then use find to delete it.

ls -li foo
42 -rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 17 15:07 foo

If the inode was 42, as in the above example, run: find . -inum 42 -exec rm -i {} \;, which will interactively prompt you to remove the file.

Run rm -i ? ?? ??? to have the shell expand to the one, two, and three-character filenames in the current directory; one of them will appear to be blank, and is probably the file in question; simply answer "no" to the prompts to remove the files you want to keep.

answered Nov 17 '17 at 20:10

Jeff Schaller

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I've used linux for years.. Never knew you could print inode info with ls, and also did not know that bash expands ?'s. Perfect answer, both solutions worked as expected. – Matt Clark Nov 17 '17 at 20:17
the 1st one looks more reliable – RomanPerekhrest Nov 17 '17 at 20:28

TheNH813 · Answer 2 · 2017-11-17T20:41:25.177

0

I tried creating a file with the same name as yours and I was able to delete it with rm every time. Do you know which version of rm you have installed? Perhaps the version you have is buggy? I assume you tried simply putting the name inside double quotes. If not, give that a try.

In the case that dosen't work, I'd suggest you try using rm with some wildcards. Move all other files out of the folder and just run the following.

rm -f "*"

That only failed me once, when the file filesystem itself was corrupt, and fsck didn't touch it. I honestly just left the file there until the next time I reformatted it.

edited Nov 17 '17 at 20:41

answered Nov 17 '17 at 20:34

TheNH813

109

Again, this is a Win10 env wrapped in Cygwin, so there could be differences there. rm (GNU coreutils) 8.26 || Packaged by Cygwin (8.26-2) – Matt Clark Nov 17 '17 at 20:38
Interesting that Cygwin actually has a newer version of coreutils then I do. Have you tried deleting the file using only escape sequences? Like, rm $(echo -e ""). Perhaps specifying each character by code would work. – TheNH813 Nov 17 '17 at 20:43

Delete file with broken name

2 Answers2