How to Remove Files ?

You may have files created with non-printable characters in the file name and have hard time removing them. Although ls has the flag -q to help you to display non-graphic characters as ?, the question mark is not the actual character. It is only a representation of the non-printable character. In order to find out the character, you can use od (octal dump) to dump them out in ASCII characters or backslash escapes format. Simply run ls -1 (minus one) and pipe the output to od -c

To remove these type of files, you can get ls -li to list out all the inode number and use the inode number (inum) in find to locate the file for removal.

# ls -li
123848 -rw-r--r-- 1 user staff 0 Feb 11 21:13 some funny file

# find . -inum 123848 -exec rm -i {} \;
rm: remove regular file `./some funny file'? y

Alternatively, you can do a rm -i ./* and say no to all except the file you want to remove. That may sound a bit dangerous.