deleting a file ending with a dot

Fri Jan 16 13:49:00 GMT 2004

Baurjan Ismagulov <ibr@ata.cs.hun.edu.tr> wrote:
> tar has created a file ending with a dot, and now I can't delete
> it (I've tried rm, del in cmd, explorer, far, unlink call with
> and without -mno-cygwin). What would you suggest before I search
> an 8-GB volume for the directory entry with a disk editor? I
> would appreciate any help (pointers to NTFS directory structure
> description also welcome). Scandisk didn't report any problems.

A common way in Unix to delete files with strange names is by
using the inode number:
 ls -1ib DIR # find inode number NUM
 find DIR -xdev -inum NUM -exec rm {} \; # remove the file
but, alas, I don't think that works either.
But I wonder how you created this file in the first place. It
seems to me that trailing dots are removed. Here is what I get
when I extract a tar file containing files with trailing dots.
(The tar file was created on Solaris.):
 $ tar xvf bad.tar
 foo/
 foo/bar0
 foo/bar1.
 foo/bar2..
 foo/bar3...
 foo/bar4....
 foo/bar5.....
 $ ls -1 foo
 bar0
 bar1
 bar2
 bar3
 bar4
 bar5
The dots are gone.
Peter
-- 
Peter J. Acklam - pjacklam@online.no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam
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