Remove linux file named with set of shell responsive characters
I've created a file named \;:$"\' to test a software of mine. I ended up with an error, because I cannot delete the file property. I'm trying to find a precise character combination to remove it via rm, but I cannot find a way.
rm \\;:$\"\\\'
rm: cannot remove `\\': No such file or directory
rm "\\"\;:$\"\\\'
rm: cannot remove `\\;:$"\\\'': No such file or directory
rm '\;:$"\'''
rm: cannot remove `\\;:$"\\': No such file or directory
(This last try killed me)
And many many other attempts. Helping hand needed!
If the files name is exactly \;:$"\', then you should be able to remove it with:
rm \\\;\:\$\"\\\'
Just ecape all the characters with a single \.
You can try ls -li in the directory containing the file and deleting the file with the inode returned by issuing find . -inum <inode-number> -exec rm -i {} \;
I added the -i to the find command to prompt before deletion in case another file is found by the find command than you expect.
In addition to the comment I tried to create and remove the file myself:
ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 test test 0 mrt 24 14:11 \;:$"\'
[test@testhost +1] /tmp/ff$ rm \\\;\:\$\"\\\'
[test@testhost +1] /tmp/ff$ ls -l
total 0
You can use single quotes, and then you only have to worry about quoting the single quote itself.
rm '\;:$"\'\'
In interactive use, you could simply use tab completion, starting with '\ or \\. Tab completion from '\ yields '\;:$"\'\''', since bash simply replaces every embedded single quote with '\''. Tab completion from nothing or from \\ yields \\\;\:\$\"\\\'.
In bash and similar shells
read -r; rm "$REPLY"
then just type in the filename literally, \;:$"\', and press Enter. The read command reads a line from standard input and saves it to the variable REPLY. The -r flag tells it to read the line literally and not interpret backslashes as escape sequences. Quoting $REPLY ensures that the contents of REPLY will be passed to rm as a single argument so this will also work even if the filename contains spaces or tabs.
(Note: If the filename contains newline characters, apparently you can use the -d option to read to change the terminating character for the string you want to enter.)