Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!mimir!hugin!augean!sirius!eco!nt!levels!ccdn From: ccdn@levels.sait.edu.au (DAVID NEWALL) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Ghost file Summary: It's easy to get rid of Ghost files Keywords: ghost, unprintable, unlink Message-ID: <795@levels.sait.edu.au> Date: 25 Nov 88 12:11:13 GMT References: <17529@adm.BRL.MIL> <8430@alice.UUCP> <169@pinn.UUCP> <303@bilver.UUCP> Organization: Sth Australian Inst of Technology Lines: 24 I had an off by one bug in a "high level" file access library, once. It's effect was to append a single character (usually > 127) to the end of all files created. Needless to say, I couldn't generate the filename from within the shell, and so I couldn't delete it using rm. But it turned out to be easy, to write a C program to delete the file. It looked sort of like this: main() { char name[] = "badfile?"; name[7] = (char) 255; unlink(name); } Of course, I had to use "od" to find out the value of the `bad' character. (Ls, by default, displays unprintable characters as "?"). -- David Newall Phone: +61 8 343 3160 Unix Systems Programmer Fax: +61 8 349 6939 Academic Computing Service E-mail: ccdn@levels.sait.oz.au SA Institute of Technology Post: The Levels, South Australia, 5095