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Full Discussion: Special Characters in directory name
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Special Characters in directory name Post 302084488 by nathan on Friday 11th of August 2006 07:37:16 AM
Old 08-11-2006
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.
Code:
#!/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;
   }
}

I'm sure there's a way to escape octal characters in the shell, but I'm not sure how. Another alternative would be to move off all the 'normal' directories to a temporary location until the only one left is the "personnel\033[D.." file. Then rmdir personnel* as above.
 

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LEARN ABOUT SUSE

rmdir

RMDIR(1)							   User Commands							  RMDIR(1)

NAME

       rmdir - remove empty directories

SYNOPSIS

       rmdir [OPTION]... DIRECTORY...

DESCRIPTION

       Remove the DIRECTORY(ies), if they are empty.

       --ignore-fail-on-non-empty

	      ignore each failure that is solely because a directory

	      is non-empty

       -p, --parents
	      remove DIRECTORY and its ancestors; e.g., `rmdir -p a/b/c' is similar to `rmdir a/b/c a/b a'

       -v, --verbose
	      output a diagnostic for every directory processed

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
	      output version information and exit

AUTHOR

       Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS

       Report rmdir bugs to bug-coreutils@gnu.org
       GNU coreutils home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       rmdir(2)

       The  full  documentation  for rmdir is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If the info and rmdir programs are properly installed at your site,
       the command

	      info coreutils 'rmdir invocation'

       should give you access to the complete manual.

GNU coreutils 7.1						     July 2010								  RMDIR(1)
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