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Date:      Mon, 15 Mar 2004 19:07:46 -0800
From:      Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu>
To:        Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org
Subject:   Re: [Fwd: Re: deleting directories with ??? in name]
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>

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On 15 Mar 2004 20:26:12 -0500
Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> wrote:

> Walter <walterk1@earthlink.net> 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



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