Getting rid of troublesome files with GNU find.

Ok, so this isn't that much of a problem these days for those who are running a GUI, but what about when X isn't available? Consider the following:

kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 kermit kermit 37 2009-08-03 21:04 -pesky

I got that file by doing:

kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ echo "Haha, sucker"\! "Try and get rid of me"\! > -pesky

Now try and issue the rm command on the file -pesky and you will find that it doesn't work so well. What can you do? Well, you can do what Bash tells you, and do:

kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ rm -f ./-pesky

Or if you read the man page for rm, you would know that you can also do:

kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ rm -f -- -pesky #The '--' tells the shell there are no more options following.

But there is another interesting way to do this operation, and it will work with other kinds of problematic, persistent files as well. We will use find to nuke the file. First, you need to find the inode number of the file, by using ls with the -i flag:

kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ ls -li
total 4
8339920 -rw-r--r-- 1 kermit kermit 37 2009-08-03 20:57 -pesky

In this case, the inode number is 8339920. Now we can tell find to find the file with that number. Once it finds it, we can -exec /bin/rm -f and remove it:

kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ find . -inum 8339920 -exec /bin/rm -f {} \;
kermit@fastbox ~/tmp/work2 $ ls -l
total 0