UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Very new user with a dumb question. While performing ls command I found some files in my directory that look like this:

#filename#

What does this mean. I cannot open with vi, cat, head, nor can I delete it with rm. Can someone educate me please, and how to fix?

THX

Dereck

I've never seen anything like that. My first guess is if you need to move/delete/edit them use the escape character '\', perhaps mv ./\#filename\# ./filename
That's just my first thought without testing.

-Seg

Thanks, but that did not work. If it helps I know how it was created. I started making a new text file using the "vi" command and the terminal window was closed before saving the file and quiting. Now it just sits in limbo, and I do not know how to delete or rename it so I can work with it.

Assuming the bad files are not in a critical directory such as /etc /root ...

Try moving everything you can out of the directory to a safe spot, then go back to the directory with the bad files and try rm -rf ./*
If that does not work, mv the directory to a new location, here's an example

the bad file is in /baddir/

mkdir /dir2
mv baddir /dir2
cd dir2

then:
rm -rf ./*


There is an appropriate way to delete the file itself, but I do not remember what it is outside my original post.

-Seg

edit: if it was left there by vi it's probably locked. I have not used vi in a long long time, if i recall correctly when the same thing happened to me i had to reenter vi and get vi to open the file, close it then it was gone. it's that kind of crap that sent me to pico in the first place.

I finnaly made things work. What I did was create a new directory called Dereck1. Changed directories "cd" to Dereck1, then:

cp ~/Dereck/* .

Went back to directory Dereck, rm -rf ./*
Then up one directory and rmdir Dereck

Never could make this work.
mkdir /Dereck1
mv Dereck /Dereck1

Kept getting message:
mv: cannot access Dereck1

Any clue what is wrong?

Looks like it should have worked from the command book, but it did not, beats me. Sure would have been easier.

Thanks for the help.

No idea why it didnt work, but it's probably something simple. In any case I'm glad you got it fixed.

-Seg

i did some thing like this ...
Enclose the file with "

It worked for me ; It should work for you toooo ....


$ cat > "#filename#"
thi is filename
$ cat "#filename#"
thi is filename
$ rm "#filename#"