an rm question
wjc at ho5cad.ATT.COM
wjc at ho5cad.ATT.COM
Mon Apr 18 03:44:15 AEST 1988
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
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