From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Feb 3 12:40:19 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from wopr.caltech.edu (wopr.caltech.edu [131.215.240.222]) by builder.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 390463EFF for ; Thu, 3 Feb 2000 12:40:10 -0800 (PST) Received: (from mph@localhost) by wopr.caltech.edu (8.9.3/8.9.1) id LAA27696; Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:42:46 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mph) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:42:46 -0800 From: Matthew Hunt To: Mauricio Marquez Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: deleting a nasty directory entry Message-ID: <20000203114246.A27386@wopr.caltech.edu> References: <3.0.32.20000203123116.016b1d40@enlace.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.20000203123116.016b1d40@enlace.net>; from mmarquez@enlace.net on Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 12:31:17PM -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 * UNIX is a lever for the http://www.pobox.com/~mph/ * intellect. -J.R. Mashey To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message