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From: donlash@uncle.uucp (Donald Lashomb)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Help!  There's a slash '/' in my filename.
Message-ID: <1991Feb3.041129.16590@uncle.uucp>
Date: 3 Feb 91 04:11:29 GMT
References: <821@nddsun1.sps.mot.com> <11714@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Reply-To: donlash@uncle.UUCP (Donald Lashomb)
Distribution: comp
Organization: U.N.C.L.E.
Lines: 30

In article <11714@helios.TAMU.EDU> n138ct@tamuts.tamu.edu (Brent Burton) writes:
=
=Thesummary line sez it.  I had problems before with mysterious
=control characters appearing in some file names as I typed them (due
=to the noisy phone lines).  
=
=  shouldn't something like:  rm "slash/file"
=  work OK?  The shell takes whatever is in quotes on the input line
=and passes it straight to the program's argv[n].  If the program
=uses this string value to manipulate the file, then maybe the string
=(and of course, the slash) are being passed to the FS manager of the
=kernel.  Would the FS then use the '/' to find the file?
=---
=Or another idea:
=   use     'rm -i *'  -- rm asks you before each file whether or not to
=delete it.  DON'T HOLD ME RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS.  CHECK YOUR LOCAL MAN
=PAGES BEFORE DOING THIS!
=
=---- I hope one of these ideas work...

I'm not a wizard, so anything I tell you here is only my best guess:

It's my understanding that the kernel itself disallows '/' in a filename,
so there's no way to get normal commands to accept it.  Try using ls -i
to get the inode # for the file, then (in single-user mode, or with the
filesystem umount'ed, or at least on a quiet system) use clri to remove
the inode followed by fsck to recover the (now unattached) data blocks.
Read your manuals carefully before trying this.

Don