Arch Linux

jlowell

Member

Registered: 2003-08-10

Posts: 270

Strange Directory And Bash Output

The other night, I installed sylpheed-claws on this box. In configuring it, I elected at one point to delete one mail account and identify it differently by re-entering it with a new name. Looking at the contents of /root this morning, I note

drwx------    5 root   root  120 Sep 28 02:56 ?y)?host.akr.ameritech.net

This entry appears just above the . and .. lines, not below them as does everything else in this directory.

Trying to remove this whatever-it-is, I run

rm -r /root/?y)?host.akr.ameritech.net

and get output

bash: syntax error near unexpected token `)'

Clearly this "thing" is flotsom and jetsom from the changes I made to sylpheed. But how to get rid of it?

jlowell

farphel

Forum Fellow

From: New Hampshire - USA

Registered: 2003-09-18

Posts: 250

Website

Re: Strange Directory And Bash Output

You could try:

rm -i *host.akr.ameritech.net

The asterisk (*) will try and match any filename.  Adding the "host.akr.ameritech.net" after the asterisk means any filename that ends with that string of characters.  The . is a way to escape the period which is also a regex symbol so we escape it to mean a real period.  The -i to rm will prevent your from inadvertantly removing any files that you don't want to.

Cheers,
farphel

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jlowell

Member

Registered: 2003-08-10

Posts: 270

Re: Strange Directory And Bash Output

farphel,

Oh my, when you have a question ask an expert, eh? 

The offending entry is gone! Sylpheed works just fine! But I made one amendment to your recommended solution once I saw how things were developing in the terminal.

Your method of locating the strangely named entry worked like a charm but the command returned the output

rm:  `20y)bhost.akr.ameritech.net' is a directory
rm:  `mailhost.akr.ameritech.net' is a directory

Changing your command option to -ir brought two questions about decending into certain directories. Not knowing whether or not the subdirectories had any real value I took the risk of running your command with -rf as the option and that did it. More guts than brains, perhaps, but I knew that if the main directory were junk, anything below it in the hierarchy was also likely to be junk.

But I really must say, your knowledge is most impressive. I never would have know how to identify that "thing" without your help. Thank you!

jlowell