Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!marob!daveh
From: daveh@marob.MASA.COM (Dave Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Ugly file name
Message-ID: <672@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 19 May 89 01:29:18 GMT
References: <105096@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <9001@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: daveh@marob.masa.com (Dave Hammond)
Organization: ESCC  New York City
Lines: 25

>Several alternatives have been suggested to uniquely identify the file
>to be removed. However, there are cases in which `rm' won't do the job
>of deleting the file because the shell which is used to run `rm' may
>strip the eighth bit off characters [some shells do]. In such cases, it
>is impossible to remove the file with `rm'. You could do a clri and fsck
>but that is a little bit of overkill. A short C program will do (see my
>other posting).

I have found the `find' command quite useful in this respect.  Find's
filename expansion has no problem handling 8-bit characters, so
something like:

find . -exec rm -i {} \;

will do the trick every time.  Since find prepends "./" to each filename,
there's even no problem removing a file which accidently got named "-f".

Assuming you can latch on to some visible piece of the offending filename
(try an `ls -q'), then add a -name arg to the `find' command line and
cut down the number of "n"s you have to type while scanning for the bad
filename.

--
Dave Hammond
daveh@marob.masa.com