How to remove files with special characters in Linux
I recently found myself having to remove a file with special characters. Using rm only gave me “rm: unrecognized option”, which forced me to take off the gloves.
To remove a file with dashes, slashes or other special characters, the easiest way is to access the file using its inode. To get the inode of a file, just do a ls -li. When you have that number, use find to delete the file using the following command:
find . -inum [inode] -exec rm -i {} \;
Good hunting!
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rm has an option built-in for doing this (see the man page):
To remove a file whose name starts with a `-', for example `-foo', use one of these commands:
rm -- -foo
rm ./-foo
so,
$ rm -- -\,my\?\ funky.file\$name
Excellent! There is one thing rm can’t handle though as far as I know, and that is when filenames contain the slash (/) character.
lol, manuals ftw.
But… how have you managed to get a file which contains a slash? I can’t even manage to create a file with a slash to even try to remove it.
http://www.unix.com/302090335-post2.html
I don’t think Linux allows a ‘/’ in a filename. ‘\’ is ok:
~/tmp2|$ touch — file/foo
touch: file/foo: No such file or directory
~/tmp2|$ touch “file/foo”
touch: file/foo: No such file or directory
~/tmp2|$ touch — file\/foo
touch: file/foo: No such file or directory
~/tmp2|$ touch “file\/foo”
touch: file\/foo: No such file or directory
~/tmp2|$ touch — ‘file/foo’
touch: file/foo: No such file or directory
~/tmp2|$ touch ‘file/foo’
touch: file/foo: No such file or directory
~/tmp2|$ touch file\foo
~/tmp2|$ ls
filefoo
~/tmp2|$ touch file\\foo
~/tmp2|$ ls
file\foo filefoo
An exception is a unicode ‘/’ maybe.
Mac OS for instance, seems to be able to handle using slashes in filenames. And if creating a file on say a NFS mount, and using that share in Linux could make things interesting.
Interesting, FWIW, all the tests I did above were in Terminal on a Macbook. Didn’t think to try from Finder.
But… here’s your answer… OS X saves the ‘/’ as ‘:’ on the file system, so it’s no problem:
~/tmp2|$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r–r–@ 1 ben staff 317 Aug 31 09:35 file:foo::bar.rtf
~/tmp2|$ rm file:foo::bar.rtf
~/tmp2|$ ls -l
~/tmp2|$
Interesting indeed. I just tried using Finder, assuming that it’s the same as using the terminal.
On a side note, he//o is converted to he��o? when saved to a linux server over smb.
Creating a file in Mac OS and saving it to a linux server using smb