From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Newsgroups: net.followup Title: Re: rm -. and ?????? Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2348 Posted: Sat Jun 12 13:34:09 1982 Received: Sun Jun 13 04:46:35 1982 References: pyuxbb.134 Removing a file whose name contains a space is not hard, if you know exactly what the file name is. Just type something like rm "foo bar" which quotes the space. Globbing can also be used, e.g. rm foo* if there are no other foo*'s, or rm foo?bar rm -i is a useful tool if you're not sure of the file name. However, in some versions of UNIX (4.1BSD in particular) a buggy program can create a file whose name contains a meta character (e.g. 0200-0377). The kernel will create such a file, but the unlink operation strips the parity bit, making it impossible to unlink, even with shell globbing. (It might be the shell that strips the parity, I'm not sure.) In any case, a sledge hammer approach that seems to work even in this case is to (1) cd to the directory, say "dir" (2) create a directory, say ../foo (3) mv * ../foo This will fail on the funny file. If you have subdirectories this is harder - you have to do some work by hand. But eventually you'll get everything moved except the bad file. (4) cd .. (5) rm -rf dir This gets rid of it. I'm not sure if an unreachable directory entry gets created which will be cleaned up on the next fsck, but it seems not to even leave that. Mark