From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Mar 15 19:02:25 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 412D716A4CE for ; Mon, 15 Mar 2004 19:02:25 -0800 (PST) Received: from priv-edtnes51.telusplanet.net (outbound04.telus.net [199.185.220.223]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EC44943D1F for ; Mon, 15 Mar 2004 19:02:24 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cpressey@catseye.mine.nu) Received: from catseye.biscuit.boo ([154.5.85.228]) by priv-edtnes51.telusplanet.netSMTP <20040316030224.HJWR29734.priv-edtnes51.telusplanet.net@catseye.biscuit.boo>; Mon, 15 Mar 2004 20:02:24 -0700 Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 19:07:46 -0800 From: Chris Pressey To: Questions Message-Id: <20040315190746.799e4b0d.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> In-Reply-To: <44smg9oa4r.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> References: <40564E2C.7060706@earthlink.net> <44smg9oa4r.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> Organization: Cat's Eye Technologies X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.9 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-portbld-freebsd4.9) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: walterk1@earthlink.net cc: freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: deleting directories with ??? in name] X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 03:02:25 -0000 On 15 Mar 2004 20:26:12 -0500 Lowell Gilbert wrote: > Walter writes: > > > I managed to delete the files by recreating the directory. > > > > Not to seem ungrateful, but isn't it a Bad Thing that it > > is not straightforeward to delete any file on the system > > (as root, and thwarted merely because of the characters in > > the name of the file/directory)? I'm not in a position to > > mangle lynx, but oughtn't it to be able to zap ANY file > > regardless of its name? (emacs is obtuse to me.) Is this > > worthy of a PR? Or are there other ways to kill a > > malconforming file? Why should an annonomous FTP user > > be able to create a directory tree that the root account > > of the machine can't traverse and delete normally? (Sigh.) > > It sounds like you're just unfamiliar with shell quoting rules. That wouldn't explain why 'rm -i *' returned 'no match', though. I think it's more likely that (for whatever reason) the FTP server is allowing files to be created with extremely funky filenames - possibly embedded NULs? I wouldn't have thought this was possible with open(2) or fopen(3) - and I wouldn't think that an FTP server would use some other method of creating a file... Walter, out of curiousity, what FTP server were you running, and (if you remember) what was the exact output of ls -aB ? -Chris