an rm question

[wjc at ho5cad.ATT.COM]

In article <27133 at yale-celray.yale.UUCP> moran-william at CS.Yale.EDU (William L. Moran Jr.) writes:

> I managed to create a file whose name contained bizarre characters; in
> fact, they were so bizarre that rm * wouldn't remove them (oh well,
> porting arc is a nasty business), I got a nonexistent file message.
> Anyway, since the directory they were in was junk I went up one dir
> and did an 'rm -r' on the directory, and that worked. So, being the
> 

The bizarre chars you mentioned probably had  some with the high-order
bit set.  Many versions of shells use that high bit for their own evil
purposes and strip it off for you (thanks a bunch).  So, the "*" being
expanded by the  shell  didn't exactly match  the  actual names of the
files  in the directory.  The  "rm -r"  doesn't use   expansion by the
shell to get it done, so you get all 8 bits intact.

I found this out by the same sort of experience you had.

	Bill Carpenter
	(AT&T gateways)!ho5cad!wjc