Unix Power Tools

14.15
If you can move all the other files out of the directory, then you’ll probably be
able to remove the leftover file and directory with rm –rf (14.16, 14.10). Moving files
and removing the directory is a bad idea, though, if this is an important system
directory like /bin. Otherwise, if you use the escaped name ls –b gave you, you
might be able to remove it directly by using the system call unlink(2) in Perl. Use
the same escape characters in Perl that ls –b displayed. (Or, if you needed to use
od –c, find the filename in the od listing of the directory—it will probably end
with a series of NUL characters, like \0 \0 \0.)
—JP
perl -e 'unlink("\t\360\207\005\254");'
14.15 Removing a Strange File
by its i-number
If wildcards don’t work (14.12) to remove a file with a strange name, try getting
the file’s i-number (14.2). Then use find’s –inum operator (9.9) to remove the file.
Here’s a directory with a weird filename. ls (with its default –q option (8.12) on
most versions) shows that the name has three unusual characters. Running ls –i
shows each file’s i-number. The strange file has i-number 6239. Give the i-number
to find, and the file is gone:
% ls
adir afile b???file bfile cfile dfile
% ls -i
6253 adir 6239 b???file 6249 cfile
9291 afile 6248 bfile 9245 dfile
% find . -inum 6239 -exec rm {} \;
% ls
adir afile bfile cfile dfile
Instead of deleting the file, I also could have renamed it to newname with the
command:
% find . -inum 6239 -exec mv {} newname \;
If the current directory has large subdirectories, you’ll probably want to keep
find from recursing down into them by using the –maxdepth 1 operator. (finds
that don’t support –maxdepth can use –prune (9.25) for speed.)
—JP
14.16 Problems Deleting Directories
What if you want to get rid of a directory? The standard—and safest—way to
do this is to use the Unix rmdir “remove directory” utility:
% rmdir files
272 Part III: Working with Files and Directories
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