How to find faster in linux

Question

I have some directory with funny character such as ^M at their back. They were created accidentally and I want to delete them.

I list the directories by ls -iql and wrote down their inode number, then I try to delete it by searching it by inode number.

find . -inum 7990028 -exec rmdir -i {} \;

But the command is so slow. I got only some hundreds of directories, but there are a lot of files inside the directories. I think the find command must have been searching through the files.

How can I improve this?

Answer 1

The . in the command means "search from the current directory". So to make it fast, you should be in the directory above the directory you want to delete. You can then also limit the search depth to the current directory, and also limit by directories only:

find . -inum 7990028 -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec rmdir -i {} \;

Answer 2

Since you know that the problematic characters are non-printable, you can simply use

rm -rf *[^[:print:]]*

Answer 3

It's probably much easier just to delete all filenames that contain the ^M in them than to, well... find.

rm -rf *CtrlVCtrlM*