Re: "??" file in home dir.

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On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 22:06 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 9:50 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Richard Shaw wrote:
> >
> >  > On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:20 AM, John Summerfield
> >  > <debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >  > > Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> >  > >  > On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:29 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
> >  > >  >> Anyone know what this is? I couldn't find any relevant pages in Google.
> >  > >  >>
> >  > >  >>  I have a file called "??" (no quotes) in the home directory of my
> >  > >  >> mythtv user. When I try to do anything to the file it acts like it's
> >  > >  >> not there. Is this something that fsck would fix? I don't know if it's
> >  > >  >> related but I noticed it after using "switchdesk" a few times to try
> >  > >  >> different desktop managers.
> >  > >  >
> >  > >  > Probably came from a a malformed Shell redirect or whatever. Anyway,
> >  > >  > given that the Shell will interpret ?? to mean "any file with a
> >  > >  > two-letter name", need to escape the ? characters in order to pass the
> >  > >  > filename to the Shell, e.g.: rm \?\?
> >  > >  >
> >  > >
> >  > >  Id' say it's a dodgy name, might not br ?? at all.
> >  > >
> >  > >  Try
> >  > >  echo ?? | xxd
> >  > >
> >  > >  eg
> >  > >  16:20 [summer@numbat ~]$ echo ?? | xxd
> >  > >  0000000: 3277 2061 7520 6b73 2073 7720 7433 2074  2w au ks sw t3 t
> >  > >  0000010: 6d20 7474 2076 6d0a                      m tt vm.
> >  > >  16:20 [summer@numbat ~]$ echo ??
> >  > >  2w au ks sw t3 tm tt vm
> >  > >  16:20 [summer@numbat ~]$
> >  >
> >
> > > Tried everything everyone suggested, no matter what I do it gives me
> >  > the standard "No file or directory" blah blah blah... Maybe I should
> >  > just fsck it and see if it goes away...
> >
> >  try
> >
> >   $ ls -l | cat -etv
> >
> >  that might show you if there are special characters (like tabs)
> >  embedded in the filename.
> >
> >  rday
> 
> That got me a little closer to an answer but I'm not sure how to
> interpret the results.
> ls -l gives me:
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 mythuser root        44 2008-03-17 22:10 ??
> ls -l | cat -etv gives me:
> -rw-rw-r-- 1 mythuser root        44 2008-03-17 22:10 M-`M-sM-,$
> 
> But how do I interpret the non-printable characters in order to remove the file?

As I said in my original reply several days ago, you can use "rm
-i" (specifically "rm -i *"). The -i means "interactive". It walks you
through every file in the directory asking if you want to remove it. To
be used with great care of course ...

I'm amazed no-one else brought this up. The -i option to rm has been
around for at least 20 years. Maybe only us oldies remember it (using
Unix since 1974 :-)

poc

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