On Thu, 2022-11-10 at 09:30 -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 02:48:28PM +0100, hw wrote: > > On Thu, 2022-11-10 at 07:03 -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > [...] > > printf '%s\0' * | hexdump > > 0000000 00c2 6177 7468 0000 > > 0000007 > > I dislike this output format, but it looks like there are two files > here. The first is 0xc2, and the second is 0x77 0x61 0x68 0x74 if > I'm reversing and splitting the silly output correctly. (This spells > "waht", if I got it right.) > >
Ah, yes. I tricked myself because I don't have hd installed, so I redirected the output of printf into a file --- which I wanted to name 'what' but I mistyped as 'waht' --- so I could load it into emacs and use hexl-mode. But the display kinda sucked and I found I have hexdump installed and used that. Meanwhile I totally forgot about the file I had created. > [...] > > > The file in question appears to have a name which is the single byte 0xc2. > Since that's not a valid UTF-8 character, ls chooses something to display > instead. In your case, it chose a '?' character. I'm the only one who can create files there, and I didn't create that. Using 0xc2 as a file name speaks loudly against that I'd create that file accidentially. > I'm guessing this is on > an older release of Debian. It's an ancient Gentoo which couldn't be updated in years because they broke the update process. Back then, Gentoo was the only Linux distribution that didn't need fuse for ZFS that I could find. > In my case, it does this: > > unicorn:~$ mkdir /tmp/x && cd "$_" > unicorn:/tmp/x$ touch $'\xc2' > unicorn:/tmp/x$ ls -la > total 80 > -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 0 Nov 10 09:21 ''$'\302' > drwxr-xr-x 2 greg greg 4096 Nov 10 09:21 ./ > drwxrwxrwt 20 root root 73728 Nov 10 09:21 ../ > > In my version of ls, there's a --quoting-style= option that can help > control what you see. But that's a tangent you can explore later. > > Since we know the actual name of the file (subdirectory) now, let's just > rename it to something sane. > > mv $'\xc2' subdir > > Then you can investigate it, remove it, or do whatever else you want. Cool, I've renamed it, thank you very much :) I'm afraid that the file system will crash when I remove it ... It's an empty directory. Ever since I noticed it, I couldn't do anything with it and I thought it's some bug in the file system.
