"??" file in home dir.

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 27 02:58:10 UTC 2008


Richard Shaw wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:20 AM, John Summerfield
> <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
>> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>>  > On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:29 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
>>  >> Anyone know what this is? I couldn't find any relevant pages in Google.
>>  >>
>>  >>  I have a file called "??" (no quotes) in the home directory of my
>>  >> mythtv user. When I try to do anything to the file it acts like it's
>>  >> not there. Is this something that fsck would fix? I don't know if it's
>>  >> related but I noticed it after using "switchdesk" a few times to try
>>  >> different desktop managers.
>>  >
>>  > Probably came from a a malformed Shell redirect or whatever. Anyway,
>>  > given that the Shell will interpret ?? to mean "any file with a
>>  > two-letter name", need to escape the ? characters in order to pass the
>>  > filename to the Shell, e.g.: rm \?\?
>>  >
>>
>>  Id' say it's a dodgy name, might not br ?? at all.
>>
>>  Try
>>  echo ?? | xxd
>>
>>  eg
>>  16:20 [summer at numbat ~]$ echo ?? | xxd
>>  0000000: 3277 2061 7520 6b73 2073 7720 7433 2074  2w au ks sw t3 t
>>  0000010: 6d20 7474 2076 6d0a                      m tt vm.
>>  16:20 [summer at numbat ~]$ echo ??
>>  2w au ks sw t3 tm tt vm
>>  16:20 [summer at numbat ~]$
>>
>>
>>  --
>>
>>  Cheers
>>  John
>>
>>  -- spambait
>>  1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
>>  -- Advice
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>>  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
>>
>>  You cannot reply off-list:-)
>>
> 
> Tried everything everyone suggested, no matter what I do it gives me
> the standard "No file or directory" blah blah blah... Maybe I should
> just fsck it and see if it goes away...
> 
> Richard
> 
cd to dir with the file
find | more

note the inode number of the problem file.

find -inum number -ls

Make sure the above returns the correct file.

then run:
find -inum number -exec rm -i {} \;

                             Roger




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