Re: removing file with newlines in name

[Frederik Fouvry]

,-- One day, you wrote:

[...]

| > $ \ls case*
| > ls: case 't':   get_all_tables = 1;
| >                         break;
| >             case 'T':   get_all_tables = 2;
| > : Invalid argument
| 
| 
| Funny that the error messages miss the last line with "cd".

That was a mistake by me.  It's not part of the file name (not that it
changes much ;-).

| Try setting the IFS variable in your shell to something that doesn't
| appear in that file name (hard to find a character that doesn't
| appear there, to be sure :-)

Tried that but without effect - it seems I cannot set IFS.  Either
it's ignored (set to read-only somewhere?), or it's overwritten each
time.

[...]

| You can always use C or perl to open the directory, readdir
| through till you get to the entry of interest and unlink it.

I had thought of that, but file system interactions are always a bit
complicated in other programming languages, so I did try that out yet.

...

Now I tried, and it doesn't work, because I cannot stat the file: none
of the Perl file tests succeed (I tried them all, as well as unlink):
there is an entry in the directory node (info coming from readdir),
but no correponding file on disk, so it seems.  As suggested earlier,
it may indeed be a case of a corrupted directory.  I'll think I'll
have to get to our system group after all.

Thanks for your help,

Frederik