Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:42:46 -0800 From: Matthew Hunt <mph@astro.caltech.edu> To: Mauricio Marquez <mmarquez@enlace.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: deleting a nasty directory entry Message-ID: <20000203114246.A27386@wopr.caltech.edu> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000203123116.016b1d40@enlace.net>; from mmarquez@enlace.net on Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 12:31:17PM -0600 References: <3.0.32.20000203123116.016b1d40@enlace.net>
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On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 12:31:17PM -0600, Mauricio Marquez wrote:
> I went with rm -i * but it says some weird characters (different that what
> appears in the ls display) is a directory. Now there´s no way I can match
> those weird characters to try to do an RMDIR ´weird chars´ and there´s no
> RMDIR -i option.
>
Hm, maybe the things ls(1) prints as question-marks aren't really
question-marks. Note that the manual page says:
-q Force printing of non-graphic characters in file names as the
character `?'; this is the default when output is to a terminal.
And then "rm -i" is just spewing the non-graphic ("weird") characters
to the terminal instead of filtering them like ls(1) does. It's trying
to remove the right thing, but it's a directory, not a regular file.
Try "rm -ri *" and again say "y" to the weird thing. If there are any
files in the weird directory, it will ask you whether to remove those,
and then it will remove the directory if it's empty.
Just for the heck of it, doing "ls -b" will list the directory using
C-style and octal escape sequences instead of the question marks. If
you don't know C that may not make any more sense to you, but it should
at least let you see that they aren't really question marks.
Matt
--
Matthew Hunt <mph@astro.caltech.edu> * UNIX is a lever for the
http://www.pobox.com/~mph/ * intellect. -J.R. Mashey
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