UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

OS: Solaris 2.6
File with no name created Mar of 2000 - ls (with or without options) shows the file but no name associated with it.
Example:
ls -ltca
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 9721 Apr 16 2003 printcap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 267 Apr 16 2003
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 258 Apr 16 2003 auto_master

Run file command:
file *
timezone: ascii text
ypservers: English text
: ascii text

I figured out that I could use the find command to look for the specific file with -type f and -size 267 so I did rename it to junk. It contained text relating to CVS. I had tried both a space and tab with the ls command but that didn't work.

Anyone ever see a file with no name?

It could have been some kind of non-printing character. I just created (under HP-UX 10.20), a "blank" filename using
touch ^H

With ls -l we get
-rw-rw-rw- 1 kw627 tech_srvs 0 Nov 9 16:40

If we do an ls -lb we see
-rw-rw-rw- 1 kw627 tech_srvs 0 Nov 9 16:40 \010

I used find to remove this too....

EDIT: An easier way to remove is to prefix the filename by the path, e.g. rm ./^H or mv ./^H junk - I'll also say I've had varying success deleting files with strange names (\014 is particularly hard to remove!), by FTPing in from a Windows machine (which doesn't interpret a lot of the escapes) and deleting the file (in this case DEL ^L does the job).

Cheers
ZB

I agree,

My best way to remove odd files is with:

# rm ./filename


This ensures you wont do anything stupid like wiping out all files in the directory. I believe quotes work as well.

ls -i
you will get inode numbers, associated with those files

to delete one of them: XXX is the inode number of the file
find -inum XXX -exec rm {} \;