OS X (Apple)

Tried the last suggestion by hicksd8, find and delete, no luck.

Also, I moved the thread to the OS-X forum as that seems more appropriate. I'd intended it to be there from the start.

cheers,
dp

If find doesn't work, no other user-mode application is going to work. The filename is invalid and the kernel refuses to touch it. You need a disk editor.

MadeInGermany and hicksd, thank you very much. As advised, I will proceed with extreme caution.

If there are any MacOS experts listening, I'd appreciate your input.

cheers,
dp

This is also my last attempt.
YOU USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!
I discovered that Windows CP 1252 certainly does have these characters as single bytes in it.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

# Windows 1252 code page 8 bit values, (with UTF-8 unicode values shown)...

NULLS=$'\x80\x80'
REG=$'\xAE'
TM=$'\x99'
FILENAME="${NULLS}"'Word Finder'"${REG}"' Plus'"${TM}"

# Should be 20 characters long.
echo "${#FILENAME}"

echo "${FILENAME}"

hexdump -C <<< "${FILENAME}"

##### !!!YOU USE BELOW AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! #####
# rm -f "${FILENAME}"

Example printout:

Code:

Last login: Fri Jul 19 17:52:27 on ttys000
AMIGA:amiga~> cd Desktop/Code/Shell
AMIGA:amiga~/Desktop/Code/Shell> ./Invalid_Filename.sh
20
??Word Finder? Plus?
00000000  80 80 57 6f 72 64 20 46  69 6e 64 65 72 ae 20 50  |..Word Finder. P|
00000010  6c 75 73 99 0a                                    |lus..|
00000015
AMIGA:amiga~/Desktop/Code/Shell> _

REMEMBER! You are messing with a file that is NOT native to OSX 10.11.x.
Save/backup everything you need before removing the final '#' on the last line and then executing this code.
WWW.UNIX.COM and its helpers in this thread do NOT hold any responsibility for anything that goes awry.

IMHO a glob match returns even unprintable characters.
So the last proposal does not improve anything.

And the clri command (didn't know it yet), will cause extra harm.
It is useless to clear the inode of the file, because an inode contains the data block structure and all meta information BUT THE FILENAME.
The filename and the pointer to the inode is stored in the directory.
The directory is another inode. To have an effect you must clear the directory inode.
I expect less damage with

Code:

unlink <directory>

if supported by the OS. If successful, you need a full file system check, in order to collect the dangling file inode and its data blocks.
I successfully did that a couple of times on a non-journaling UFS in single-user mode (no desktop, no other processes running).

I would go for a disk editor. Find the offending name, compare the shown bytes with the characters from the ls command, change one byte, save, compare again, ...

Here is an OSX man page for clri

Code:

https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/8/clri/

Also available as an OpenDarwin man page:

Code:

https://www.unix.com/man-page/opendarwin/8/clri/

Quoting:

I don't use OSX, but perhaps this would work.

Code:

ls -i
1180383 weird-file.txt
jon@ranger:one space$ find . -inum 1180383 -delete