Ubuntu – Cannot delete/move files with special characters in file name

encodingfilenamefilesfilesystem

As you can see below the files have uncommon characters.

file manager screenshot

Deleting them either in the terminal or Dolphin returns the error:

No such file or directory

Running ls -la on the directory gave me this output:

-rw-rw-r--  1 aalap aalap      0 Nov 14 01:05 ??
-rw-rw-r--  1 aalap aalap      0 Nov 14 01:05 ?2?.???љ?!?Gb??σ?[?F?
-rw-rw-r--  1 aalap aalap      0 Nov 14 01:05 ??3]d???:????????1????G?p?ȋ??????嫳?d????ą-??
-rw-rw-r--  1 aalap aalap      0 Nov 14 01:05 3l??#g?w????O?JKB7?co??քH??bT?NA???S???X?I?A?qC??M?I???
-rw-rw-r--  1 aalap aalap      0 Nov 14 01:05 ??8??-?@,?Zp?[?bI????7^?ñ[?ڏ??z?O???ч??eEȰ?+??,OF??h

I ran an fsck command on the partition from another OS but it didn't change anything.

How do I remove these files?

Best Answer

A simple way would be to remove these files by their inode. :)

Use ls -li in the directory with the uncommon characters to show the inode number of each file, e.g.,

$ ls -li
total 0
133370 -rw-r--r-- 1 malte malte 0 Dec 30 19:00 ?2?.???љ?!?Gb??σ?[?F?
132584 -rw-r--r-- 1 malte malte 0 Dec 30 18:59 ??3]d???:????????1????G?p?ȋ??????嫳?d????ą-??

Next, use the find utility to delete the corresponding file by its name, using the syntax find <somepath> -inum <inode_number> -exec rm -i {} \;, as in the following example:

$ find . -inum 133370 -exec rm -i {} \;
rm: remove regular empty file ‘./?2?.???љ?!?Gb??σ?[?F?’? y
$ ls -li
total 0
132584 -rw-r--r-- 1 malte malte 0 Dec 30 18:59 ??3]d???:????????1????G?p?ȋ??????嫳?d????ą-??

The -i option to rm is not really necessary, I just added it to keep you from accidentally removing files you didn't mean to remove. :) It causes rm to ask for confirmation for each file that you want to delete.

If you want to remove multiple files by their inodes, you can use the -o (meaning or) syntax for find:

$ find .  \( -inum 133370 -o -inum 132584 \) -exec rm -i {} \;
rm: remove regular empty file ‘./?2?.???љ?!?Gb??σ?[?F?’? y
rm: remove regular empty file ‘./??3]d???:????????1????G?p?ȋ??????嫳?d????ą-??’? y

You can add more inode numbers by extending the expression in parentheses with more -o -inum <inode_number> expressions.

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