"??" file in home dir.
Richard Shaw
hobbes1069 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 27 03:06:58 UTC 2008
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 9:50 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 26 Mar 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 ~]$
> >
>
> > 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...
>
> try
>
> $ ls -l | cat -etv
>
> that might show you if there are special characters (like tabs)
> embedded in the filename.
>
> rday
That got me a little closer to an answer but I'm not sure how to
interpret the results.
ls -l gives me:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mythuser root 44 2008-03-17 22:10 ??
ls -l | cat -etv gives me:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mythuser root 44 2008-03-17 22:10 M-`M-sM-,$
But how do I interpret the non-printable characters in order to remove the file?
Thanks,
Richard
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