Ugly file name

Leslie Mikesell les at chinet.chi.il.us
Thu May 18 03:31:02 AEST 1989


In article <9001 at csli.Stanford.EDU> gandalf at csli.stanford.edu (Juergen Wagner) writes:
>Several alternatives have been suggested to uniquely identify the file
>to be removed. However, there are cases in which `rm' won't do the job
>of deleting the file because the shell which is used to run `rm' may
>strip the eighth bit off characters [some shells do]. In such cases, it
>is impossible to remove the file with `rm'. You could do a clri and fsck
>but that is a little bit of overkill. A short C program will do (see my
>other posting).

On at least some machines (e.g 3B1), even rm -i * won't work to
delete a file where the name has a character with the high bit set.
The easiest way is to use dired in GNU emacs if you happen to have it.
Emacs is what created the file in the first place - the 3B1 has a key
labeled <break> which happens to generate x'FF' (which doesn't
work as a break unless you happen to be cu'd through a 7-bit link to
something else), and emacs rightly accepted it like any other key.

Les Mikesell



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