Hi all,

I've got a couple of directorys with special chars in the name:

# ls -q
personnel?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D?[D

unilive_?[B?[H?[L?[F?[L?[L?[Lpwd

I do not know how to get into these directorys to check if anything is their before deleting. Also I do not know ho wto delete these directorys.

Any help would be greatful!

Cheers

To help determine what the characters are, I would use the '-b' option with ls.

       -b, --escape
              print octal escapes for nongraphic characters

cd personnel*

rmdir personnel*

Unfortunatly I do have another folder called personnel hence cannot do rmdir personnel*

ls -b
personnel\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D\033[D

Do you have Perl? Something like this might work. You would have to uncomment the rmdir line, but I would recommend this only after you know it's printing only the directory name you want to delete.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

my @files = glob("personnel*");

# 27 decimal = 33 octal
$char = sprintf("%c",27);

foreach $file ( @files ) {
   if ( $file =~ m/personnel$char/ ) {
     printf "dir = $file\n";
     # rmdir $file;
   }
}

Unfortuantly we do not have perl and the personnel directory is in constant use so cannot rename.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

May be it will help you.....just put a double quote to escape the octals....

rmdir "dir/asdasdasdasa\asdalsdada/withlongname"


regards
Apoorva Kumar