Linux – Removing file which doesn’t have any permissions and attributes

fileslinux

I have a file on my external hard disk named ._Icon^M.I ended up with this after using my hard disk on old Mac platform machine.
I want to delete this file but unable to.

For the command 'ls -al' it shows as

dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 8192 Mar 6 19:53 ..
-????????? ? ?    ?       ?           ? ._Icon?

Seeing this I tried to add ownership (using chown) and modify the permissions(using chmod) but the commands are not recognising ._Icon as file or a directory.

I tried deleting the file using the command –

find . -name '._*' -exec rm '{}' ';'

rm is not able to remove as it is not interpreting it as a file or a directory
The console after running the above command is

rm: cannot remove './._Icon\r': No such file or directory

How do I delete such a file?

Best Answer

A few things you can try:

Try to complete the file using tab autocompletion. For example
```
rm .[TAB]
```
Move all other files from this directory somewhere else and then delete the directory. That should get rid of the file.
Move all other files and just run (assuming GNU find) this:
```
find . -type f -delete
```
Delete all files in the directory that start with a dot:
```
rm -r .*
```
Get the file's inode and delete it using that. ls -i should show you the inode. Alternatively, run
```
find . -printf "%i %f\n"
```
Once you have the inode, try deleting using find again:
```
find . -inum XXX -delete
```
Try this Perl script. Change dirname for the name of the directory containing the file and run this from the parent directory. So, if your file is ~/foo/file run this in ~/ and change dirname to foo.
```
perl  -e 'use File::Path qw(remove_tree); remove_tree("dirname")'
```

Related Solutions

Unable to delete file, even as root

The file is an H2 file lock, from a lift-based (web) application. H2 uses an interesting file locking protocol, the file will be re-created pretty much immediately if that database is in use.

(The filename matches the default persistence database name for that framework.)

You need to stop whatever app server is running that database to get rid of that file if you want it gone. (But do you really?)

Your strace output clearly shows that the unlink is successful.

unlinkat(AT_FDCWD, "lift_proto.db.lock.db", 0) = 0

An inode number can be re-used. Filesystems could use whatever allocation strategy they want, but nothing prevents them from reallocating the same inode number.

On an idle ext3 filesystem:

$ touch a
$ stat -c %i a
593358
$ rm a
$ touch a
$ stat -c %i a
593358
$ touch a b
$ stat -c %i a b
593358
593362
$ rm a b
$ touch b a
$ stat -c %i a b
593362
593358

Linux – How to Make a File Not Modifiable

You can set the "immutable" attribute with most filesystems in Linux.

chattr +i foo/bar

To remove the immutable attribute, you use - instead of +:

chattr -i foo/bar

To see the current attributes for a file, you can use lsattr:

lsattr foo/bar

The chattr(1) manpage provides a description of all the available attributes. Here is the description for i:

   A  file with the `i' attribute cannot be modified: it cannot be deleted
   or renamed, no link can be created to this file  and  no  data  can  be
   written  to  the  file.  Only the superuser or a process possessing the
   CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE capability can set or clear this attribute.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Unable to delete file, even as root

Linux – How to Make a File Not Modifiable

Related Question