"??" file in home dir.

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Richard Shaw wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:20 AM, John Summerfield
> <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
> > Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> >  > On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:29 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
> >  >> Anyone know what this is? I couldn't find any relevant pages in Google.
> >  >>
> >  >>  I have a file called "??" (no quotes) in the home directory of my
> >  >> mythtv user. When I try to do anything to the file it acts like it's
> >  >> not there. Is this something that fsck would fix? I don't know if it's
> >  >> related but I noticed it after using "switchdesk" a few times to try
> >  >> different desktop managers.
> >  >
> >  > Probably came from a a malformed Shell redirect or whatever. Anyway,
> >  > given that the Shell will interpret ?? to mean "any file with a
> >  > two-letter name", need to escape the ? characters in order to pass the
> >  > filename to the Shell, e.g.: rm \?\?
> >  >
> >
> >  Id' say it's a dodgy name, might not br ?? at all.
> >
> >  Try
> >  echo ?? | xxd
> >
> >  eg
> >  16:20 [summer at numbat ~]$ echo ?? | xxd
> >  0000000: 3277 2061 7520 6b73 2073 7720 7433 2074  2w au ks sw t3 t
> >  0000010: 6d20 7474 2076 6d0a                      m tt vm.
> >  16:20 [summer at numbat ~]$ echo ??
> >  2w au ks sw t3 tm tt vm
> >  16:20 [summer at numbat ~]$
>
> Tried everything everyone suggested, no matter what I do it gives me
> the standard "No file or directory" blah blah blah... Maybe I should
> just fsck it and see if it goes away...

try

  $ ls -l | cat -etv

that might show you if there are special characters (like tabs)
embedded in the filename.

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
========================================================================