I recently unpacked a set of backup files in RHEL3 - 2.4kernel with tar via:
tar -xvf backupfile
It started to error out a bunch and I aborted thinking that maybe it was a gzip instead. Unpacking via:
tar -zxvf backupfile
Worked fine but now I have a handful of files that are highlighted red with crazy random names. I am unable to delete them using rm -f
. Is there any thing else I can do? I'm root, they are owned by root/root. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks.
rm -f
."? Is it that you're unable to type the filenames, because they're "crazy" and "random"? Or are you successfully typing the names, butrm
is giving you an error message? If the latter, what is the error message?-f
flag torm
is "ignore nonexistent files". For example, if you were to type something likerm -f the_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog
, you'll get a shell prompt (with no error message), but nothing will happen (unless you happen to have a file by that name). I suspect that the file names have invisible control characters, and so you're just not typing them accurately. One quick way to check this would be to type therm
commands without-f
.