UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

I believe the shell is what is considered the new c shell, tcsh, the problem is solved thank you very much for your efforts, I would rather not give you anything more it is a general problem that ls is showing a file name which is not there. I will be looking under I/o to learn to delete these , I have found you truly cannot open these listed files they were named but never constructed. As I wrote above it is a sysiocod error which means that there was a problem from the sender. Maybe lynx which is a text command line browser, or the web site . Thanks anyway , it is the standard ls utility on freebsd which shows blank names which are none constructed files being I think because they are to come from a third party and never do.

I'm glad that you have solved your problem.

But, ls does not show a filename that is not there. The filenames that ls does show may contain characters that disappear when displayed on a terminal, may contain characters that cause some characters of a filename to overwrite other text on your screen, and might contain sequences of characters that cause terminal to display some parts of a filename in random places on your screen (although I thought BSD versions of ls normally translated those sequences to visible character sequences). If you'd like help in removing these files (they really do exist), we'd be happy to help if you would supply some of the details we've requested. If you want to keep accumulating files that you don't seem to be able to process, that is your choice.

As Don has already said, you asked for assistance but then won't give us the information to allow us to answer correctly. What do you want? Wrong answers which we have had to guess?

If you have a Unix/Linux problem this is the right place to bring it. The experts volunteering their time are the best on the planet so please don't be so abrasive to us all.

Back to your problem, refer back to my post#4. I think you are right that the file(s) never arrive. During the download process, Lynx receives the data stream into a temporary file in /tmp and also holds a zero length file open in the destination directory that you specify. During the download process, those files are visible to 'ls' of course.

If the download process aborts, hits time-out, or whatever, Lynx will back-out and clean-up removing the files from /tmp and the destination directory. The result is that the file you saw using 'ls' is now gone!

This is a guess!!!