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Sorry if I am not using the right terms for naming these "backspace chars".

I would like to clean up a directory that contains two files which looks like they contain backspace in their name. If I list the directory:

ls -la

I get this:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 729 Jun 26 2007 z_regular.mk -rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 1 Sep 7 2016 -rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 3220 Sep 27 2

I am thinking I mistakenly imputed the file names with "backspace chars", so we do not see the names any more.

How do I rename these last two files?

I don't know how to call them. Is there an ls option allowing me to display the file names in hexa or something, and how could I use the latest in an mv command? I'm with AIX Unix TLS v6.

edit:

the files are respectively 2 and 4 del chars:

ls -lb

gives 

-rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 1 Sep 7 2016 \177\177 -rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 3220 Sep 27 2 \177\177\177\177\177

But solutions found at How can I delete a file with no name doesn't work for my case in AIX.

I tried the below without success so far:

l>ls -l $'\0177\0177' $\0177\0177 not found l>ls -l '\0177\0177' \0177\0177 not found l>ls -l '\177\177' \177\177 not found
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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

The $'\ooo' syntax (from ksh93 and now found on most modern Bourne-like shells including zsh, bash, mksh, FreeBSD sh) uses the standard (as in C and most other languages) as opposed to echo syntax for octal escapes. So, that's \ followed with up to 3 octal digits: $'\177'. $'\0177' would be like $'\017'7. So:

ls -ld $'\177\177' mv $'\177\177' better-name

(note that \177, aka ^? or DEL character in ASCII, is not the Backspace/^H/BS/\10 character)

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I found solution at the bottom of suggested duplicate:

  1. identify node numbers

    ls -lbi 25553 -rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 1 Sep 7 2016 \177\177 25559 -rwxrwxrwx 1 guy guy 3220 Sep 27 2 \177\177\177\177\177

  2. then it's possible to move when returned from find:

    find . -inum 25553 |xargs -I{} mv {} recovered.x find . -inum 25559 |xargs -I{} mv {} recovered.y
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