UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey guys,
A little problem that I'm facing. I unintentionally copied something to a directory and now i want to clean it up. Please help in this regard ...

Here is the list of the files that I have (ls -la):


-r--r----- 1 ovq123 Khan 16777216 J
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ovq123 Khan 2760 Feb 7 2008 core.war
-rw-r--r-- 1 ovq123 Khan 17194526 May 22 11:25 MLWM.war

The bolded out line is the one that I'm having problem with. I don't know what that files name is .... It appears as just blank. The month is just J. Can I specifically delete this file on the base of the file size and the user (or anything) ??

Gurus, Please help a brother out!! appreciate it very much.

Thanks....

Mister Khan

The filename probably contains control characters. First find out what characters are in the filename and how many there are:

Code:

ls -la | sed -n l

Also try the "-b" switch to "ls".

Code:

ls -lab

Between these two outputs from "ls" there should be enough information to rename the file. I would not recommend trying to delete the file with its current name.

This is what I got ...

$ ls -lab | grep $LOGNAME

-r--r----- 1 ovq123 Khan 16777216 Jul 9 2008 \177\177\177\177\177\177\177\177\177\177\177\177

-rw-rw-r-- 1 ovq123 Khan 2760 Feb 7 2008 coreUtils.war

-rw-r--r-- 1 ovq123 Khan 17194526 May 22 11:25 QueuesML.war

I tried re-naming it (mv command) but it wouldn't let me ... any other ideas ??

ls -i will tell you the inode number of the tile, which you can feed into the find tool to help you delete or rename it. Here's an example.

Code:

# Create an example file
$ touch this
# Get its inode
$ ls -i
66278 this
# Find and rename the file based on its inode
$ find ./ -inum 66278 -exec mv '{}' 'sanity' ';'
$ ls -i
66278 sanity
$ rm sanity
$

Does it show any error, message, or something after you try to delete it?
Also, how are you trying to delete the file?

Thanks a lot methyl and corona ... it worked like wonders. Wow, I feel so good. I was trying to delete this bugger for the last 3 days. Finally ... done. Thanks again.

Regards,
Mister Khan

Just for completeness we can use the output from "ls -lab" to generate the filename. Here I am creating a file with the same name as yours and renaming the file.

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
FILENAME=`echo "\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177\0177"`
touch "${FILENAME}"
ls -labd "${FILENAME}"
mv "${FILENAME}" junk_file
ls -labd junk_file


-rw-r--r--   1 root       sys              0 Jun  5 14:38 \177\177\177\177\177\1
77\177\177\177\177\177\177
-rw-r--r--   1 root       sys              0 Jun  5 14:38 junk_file