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Date:      Tue, 16 Mar 2004 10:18:34 -0500
From:      Walter <walterk1@earthlink.net>
To:        Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
Cc:        Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: [Fwd: Re: deleting directories with ??? in name]
Message-ID:  <40571ACA.3060302@earthlink.net>
In-Reply-To: <20040316122231.GA55349@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk>
References:  <40564E2C.7060706@earthlink.net> <44smg9oa4r.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> <20040315190746.799e4b0d.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> <20040316122231.GA55349@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk>

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Matthew Seaman wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 07:07:46PM -0800, Chris Pressey wrote:
> 
> 
>>That wouldn't explain why 'rm -i *' returned 'no match', though.
> 
> 
> Just to eliminate the obvious: did these weird filenames begin with a
> '.'?  Shell globbing treats file names with a leading period
> specially. You'ld have to do:
> 
>     % ls -d .*
> 
> to get a listing of those files, and:
> 
>     % rm -ri .[^.]* 
> 
> to delete them.  Note the extra effort taken to avoid matching the
> special names '.' and '..' -- doing a recursive delete of '..' is a
> real foot-shooting exercise.
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew
> 

I don't remember whether the files had leading dots or not.  Sorry.
But I'll keep this method in mind if it happens again.  Thanks.



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