UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

DukeNuke2,

Again, no luck:

Code:

djCUDA:ee macuser$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -inum 3774747 -delete
find: -delete: unlink(./␀INITPicker 2.0): Invalid argument

I know essentially nothing about UNIX, but surely I'm not the first person to run into this problem of a NUL in the filename?

I appreciate members taking the time to post suggestions! regards, David

The name of a file is a null-terminated string, so it is normally impossible to create a file with a name containing a null character. Please change directory to the directory containing the file you can't remove and then show us the output you get from the command:

Code:

ls *T* | od -bc

Hi,

I'm hopefull that you've already tried the empty trash from the GUI and that that just failed to remove the file, what I would also suggest is that you try and rename the file within the GUI and then delete it.

I have seen something similar to this on my Macbook, but can't remember whether I deleted it from the CLI or the GUI.

As a last option, you could also check out the stuff here at the Apple Support page.

Regards

Gull04

Another trick that I have used on Unix with great care is:

Code:

 
 # cd <directory of oddly named file>
 # rm -i *

which will offer you every file in the directory for a Y/N for deletion. You can then say 'N' for all but the file that you want rid of where you say 'Y'. However, it's not much good on a directory with thousands of files in it and you must double check you location and everything before you use it.

I've just checked the OSX man page repository on this forum and 'rm' in OSX does support then '-i' switch.

I created a file with the same name as the OP and tried to delete it with every trick in the book. No luck! The problem is the "NUL" character at the begining which is a 3 byte character and nothing seems to work for that. I found a website which claims that this is a Mac OS 10.11.X only problem. Now I'm also stuck with that file... But in the next few days I will do a complete new install of 10.12.X and so I'm not concerned much, yet!

But I'm glad if someone is able to find a solution!

Does OSX support specification of a character in the form ^000 to represent NUL?

---------- Post updated at 12:12 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:03 PM ----------

@DN2......since you are going to rebuild the system anyway, does OSX support 'clri' command? If so, what happens if you nuke the inode completely using that?

Yes, know that in such circumstances the blocks of the cleared file will show up as 'missing' on a fsck.

Repeat, I'm not an OSX user so I'm just talking generic Unix/Linux here but I've nuked many an inode (with success) to clear a file and then run fsck afterwards to clean up.

Everyone except DN2 please ignore this post. It's dangerous!

The clri command is not part of OSX. On which system did you use it?