How to remove a directory or file with special characters in Solaris


 
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Operating Systems Solaris How to remove a directory or file with special characters in Solaris
# 1  
Old 08-05-2010
How to remove a directory or file with special characters in Solaris

I finally figured out how to remove a file or directory with special characters in the name. It's kind of rudimentary so I thought I would share it with everyone:

find .inum [number] -exec rm -rf {} \;
# 2  
Old 08-05-2010
Code:
find /path -inum [number] -exec rm -rf {} \;

Note: there are syntax errors in the above post. The -r also is potentially dangerous if the file is a directory - all of the subdirectories and files will be deleted as well.
These 2 Users Gave Thanks to jim mcnamara For This Post:
# 3  
Old 08-05-2010
Personally I would rename the directory to something sensible and avoid passing strange filenames to powerful commands like "rm".

Btw. The posted "find" commands could be improved with a "-xdev" (or in some older versions "-mount") parameter because inode numbers are only unique within a filesystem.
# 4  
Old 08-05-2010
Thanks for clearifying that all subdirectories and files will be deleted as this was my intention. I put the . and didn't add the -inum either. If any body has a better way to do this then please post or if you have a way to delete the directories without deleting all the contents within the directory than please post. I've tried way too many ways so be prepared for some constructive criticism if I find a way that does not work.
# 5  
Old 08-05-2010
It is not possible to delete a directory which is not empty.

Is you problem confined to directory names which contain special characters?
# 6  
Old 08-05-2010
Actually my problem was with removing directories with names that began with special charaters and ending with special characters. Any help with this would be great as I was able to get around the problem at first by changing the directory to a name that didn't begin with special characters by saying:

Code:
 
find . -inum [number] -exec mv {} ./del \;

Then I just did the rmdir -r command.
# 7  
Old 08-07-2010
Warning warning Will Robinson. Scary script.

Correspondents reading this post please be aware that this script is not for general use. It does not contain a "-xdev" (or "-mount" for some versions of unix) parameter which would prevent the script moving files with matching inode number from all filesystems it encounters during the "find".

Nuff said.
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