mjhjmtu

I've somehow created a file that I can not seem to figure out how to delete via CLI.

$ ls -alF
total 8195
-rw-r--r--+ 1 me my_group 0 Jul 19 14:10 ''$'r'
drwxrwx---+ 1 system system 0 Nov 17 14:58 ./
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 system system 0 Jul 17 15:40 ../
...

The first line item here I can not seem to find the correct escape sequence to be able to delete.

Attempting to grep this entry does not even work properly:

$ ls -alF | head -n2
total 8195
-rw-r--r--+ 1 me my_group 0 Jul 19 14:10

Note that when grepping / using other pipe'd commands, I can never see the name of the file.

this is a Cygwin wrapped Win10 environment

Two suggestions:

1. 
   

   Run ls -li to get the inode, then use find to delete it.

   
   
   

   ls -li foo
   42 -rw-r--r--. 1 user group 0 Nov 17 15:07 foo
   

   
   

If the inode was 42, as in the above example, run: find . -inum 42 -exec rm -i ;, which will interactively prompt you to remove the file.

2. Run rm -i ? ?? ??? to have the shell expand to the one, two, and three-character filenames in the current directory; one of them will appear to be blank, and is probably the file in question; simply answer "no" to the prompts to remove the files you want to keep.

I tried creating a file with the same name as yours and I was able to delete it with rm every time. Do you know which version of rm you have installed? Perhaps the version you have is buggy? I assume you tried simply putting the name inside double quotes. If not, give that a try.

In the case that dosen't work, I'd suggest you try using rm with some wildcards. Move all other files out of the folder and just run the following.

rm -f "*"

That only failed me once, when the file filesystem itself was corrupt, and fsck didn't touch it. I honestly just left the file there until the next time I reformatted it.