From: utzoo!decvax!duke!mcnc!rlgvax!guy Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: rm ABC* Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1051 Posted: Tue Feb 15 02:35:56 1983 Received: Thu Feb 17 07:46:11 1983 The problem is that the unprintable character has its uppermost bit turned on. "ls" has no trouble because it reads the directory directly and immediately stuffs the pathname through "stat" (and, with the Berkeley "ls - but NOT other "ls"es - turns the unprintable to "?"), but the "rm ABC*" passes through the shell's star-convention expansion mechanism. If I remember correctly, the Bourne shell (and probably the C shell, and most other UNIX shells) use the uppermost bit to indicate that the character has been quoted (with "", '', or \), and thus have to strip that bit off when they hand the filename to the command. Therefore, "rm" is trying to remove "ABC\001" instead of "ABC\201"; the former does not exist, so it complains. Guy Harris RLG Corporation (...!decvax!duke!mcnc!rlgvax!guy) P.S. The only way I know of getting rid of that file is to write your own little program which executes unlink("ABC\201");.