Hao Truong wrote: > How can I remove file listed below ?: > !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
With the name of this file it is probably a problem with your shell. The '!' character in csh expands to a history argument. Other shells such as bash also provide csh like functionality. touch '!!!foo' rm !!!foo bash: !foo: event not found Probably you need to quote the filename. It depends upon your shell and without knowing that it is only possible to guess. Here is an example. I create a fliename with '!' characters in it and then remove it. Yours is probably similar. touch '!!!foo' ls -l '!!!foo' -rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2006-01-27 09:14 !!!foo rm '!!!foo' ls -l '!!!foo' ls: !!!foo: No such file or directory Several tricks exist for dealing with filenames with unusual characters. One is to use 'rm -i *'. This will prompt before removing files. Select yes for the file you want to remove and no for all other files. Here is an example: mkdir /tmp/a cd /tmp/a touch '!!!foo' abc xyz ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2006-01-27 09:17 !!!foo -rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2006-01-27 09:16 abc -rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2006-01-27 09:16 xyz rm -i * rm: remove regular empty file `!!!foo'? y rm: remove regular empty file `abc'? n rm: remove regular empty file `xyz'? n ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2006-01-27 09:16 abc -rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 0 2006-01-27 09:16 xyz Another trick is to use a modern shell such as bash that does filename completion upon TAB. Allow the shell to expand the filename. Here is an example where "TAB" means I enterred a tab character. Then shell then acted upon that and completed the filename. touch '!!!foo' rm !TAB rm \!\!\!foo Upon TAB the bash shell will replace the "!" with the filename expansion with individual characters quoted as needed. This reveals that there are several different ways to quote shell metacharacters. Emacs users will often use the Emacs directory editing features for this process. In emacs edit the directory. Then use the dired commands to delete files and directories. 'D' to mark the file for deletion and then 'x' to execute the operation. The emacs code will quote the filenames properly for th shell and so the user can remove files with unusual names in the Emacs dired mode without needing to know the shell file quoting conventions. > Subject: Re: help A subject such as "help" is really a terrible subject. It is too generic. Many people would never even read the message! Can you imagine a mailbox where many messages are all "help" or "bug"? It does not help the person trying to help you. In the future you will have much better results if you select a good subject for your message. In this case something like "How to remove files named !!!!FOO?" or "rm !!!FOO fails" or something like that would be much better. Pick something representative of the topic but as concise as possible. Hope this helps, Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
