rm a corrupt file

Question

I am trying to remove a file using rm. However, if I do ls, all the information about the file is ?????? ?? ?? example.txt... And calling rm returns that no such file exists. How can I force a remove of the file?

Answer 1

You can try: rm -f example.txt

Or touch example.txt && rm -f example.txt (update timestamp on the file first)

Or chmod 777 example.txt && rm -f example.txt (set readable, writeable, executable then remove it).

As suggested above, fsck is a good idea as well.

Answer 2

Depends on the filesystem used, but most of the time you need to check the filesystem with fsck (the variant of it, whatever your filesystem is).