Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Anyone knows why I can't display the contents of my directory and how to fix this? Are my data corrupted? Executing 'file' command doesn't work either.

Snapshot:


Thanks in advance for your kind advise.

Deanne

Go up one level higher in the directory structure and do a ls -l and see the permission on the directory.

cheers,
Devaraj Takhellambam

Thanks devtakh.
There's nothing wrong with its permission.

How long has it been doing this? Sometimes the terminal can get messed up and you have to type "reset" or close and reopen it, but if it's been doing that for a while, that's likely not the case.

The last readable line - the filename there has embedded non-printing characters which are resetting terminal characteristics.

Code:

ls -l | od -c

will let you look at it without scrambling the screen output.

As pointed out earlier the reset command will undo the crud display setting.

I am not familiar with the "lt" command in your post. Is it jus an alias for "ls -lat" or something? What Operating System do you have?

Also please post the output from these two commands. If you type them before the screen goes funny you should be able to read the output. We are looking for octal codes buried in filenames which affect the screen display.

Code:

ls -la | sed -n l
ls -lab

Thanks guys.

I can do reset to restore my terminal. But I wanted to display and navigate the directory. I didn't notice when exactly it started acting like this but it's been a while since I last accessed this data.

Here's the output I get for ls -l | od -c


Here's the output I get for ls -la | sed -n l and ls -lab


From the output of these commands I see that the file "\01\16/" must be causing the problem! I don't remember creating this file manually. Btw 'lt' is my alias for 'ls -lat'. My OS is Solaris 10.


EDIT:
For checking purposes I used FTP from a Windows terminal. This problematic file is a directory automatically created by a utility that is supposed to run only in Solaris 8. I believe this is the cause of the strange terminal output. Thanks everyone!