How to remove a directory or file with special characters in Solaris

UNIX Solaris
1

I finally figured out how to remove a file or directory with special characters in the name. It's kind of rudimentary so I thought I would share it with everyone:

find .inum [number] -exec rm -rf {} \;

2 
find /path -inum [number] -exec rm -rf {} \;

Note: there are syntax errors in the above post. The -r also is potentially dangerous if the file is a directory - all of the subdirectories and files will be deleted as well.

2 Likes
3

Personally I would rename the directory to something sensible and avoid passing strange filenames to powerful commands like "rm".

Btw. The posted "find" commands could be improved with a "-xdev" (or in some older versions "-mount") parameter because inode numbers are only unique within a filesystem.

4

Thanks for clearifying that all subdirectories and files will be deleted as this was my intention. I put the . and didn't add the -inum either. If any body has a better way to do this then please post or if you have a way to delete the directories without deleting all the contents within the directory than please post. I've tried way too many ways so be prepared for some constructive criticism if I find a way that does not work.

5

It is not possible to delete a directory which is not empty.

Is you problem confined to directory names which contain special characters?

6

Actually my problem was with removing directories with names that began with special charaters and ending with special characters. Any help with this would be great as I was able to get around the problem at first by changing the directory to a name that didn't begin with special characters by saying:

 
find . -inum [number] -exec mv {} ./del \;

Then I just did the rmdir -r command.

7

Warning warning Will Robinson. Scary script.

Correspondents reading this post please be aware that this script is not for general use. It does not contain a "-xdev" (or "-mount" for some versions of unix) parameter which would prevent the script moving files with matching inode number from all filesystems it encounters during the "find".

Nuff said.

8

easier way:

# ls
    @#hello
    world
# rm **hello
# ls
   world
#