From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!turtleva!ken Newsgroups: net.sources,net.unix-wizards Title: Re: rm ABC* Article-I.D.: turtleva.160 Posted: Tue Feb 15 19:47:51 1983 Received: Sun Feb 20 12:16:49 1983 References: lanl-a.222 The file you have a hard time removing (ABC?) has some kind of unprintable character in it; ls senses that it isn't printable and puts a '?' in place of the unprintable character. On earlier UNIX systems, there used to be a program called "dsw" (a program with questionable etymology), which allowed you to interactively delete files in the current directory. "rm -i" is an attempt to consolidate all the different types of removal programs, but it doesn't fully take the place of dsw, because it doesn't change the unprintable characters to a '?'. Therefore, when you say "rm -i *", you never see "ABC?". One suggestion is to do an "od -c .", and look for the file with the unprintable character; then you can use one of various quoting mechanisms to specifically delete the offending file. Another is to find some sort of pattern that can uniquely describe the file, such as "*BC*". Try it out with "ls" first, then with "rm".