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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?

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    The questionmarks could also mean your file name contains characters your terminal can not display. Does ls -lha provide more information? Aug 2, 2010 at 15:35

2 Answers 2

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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.

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  • Someone care to explain why this answer is -1?
    – mistiry
    Aug 3, 2010 at 21:58
  • Don't know. I can see nothing wrong with it. I upvoted, but it should be at 1 now... Aug 4, 2010 at 7:36
  • Did any of those fix your problem? Thanks for the upvote!
    – mistiry
    Aug 4, 2010 at 21:21
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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).

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