Deleting file with reserved characters via SSH

Question

While developing a server-side application, I accidentally created a couple of files that are named similar to this:

<?php echo $_GET[\'team\'] ?>files.json

Even after I add the necessary backslashes to try to rm those files, Terminal says those files don't exist. My FTP GUI will not delete them either.

I'd appreciate help with how to deal with this situation — I couldn't find anything via Google or Stack Overflow.

Answer 1

One common approach is to use something like Perl or Ruby to delete the file:

perl -e 'unlink("random crazy file")'
ruby -e 'File.unlink("random crazy file")'

That avoids the whole shell thing.

The other easy way to do it, with an interactive shell like bash, is to type rm fi, hit tab, and let bash complete the filename for you. That quotes well.

Answer 2

I could have used a more precise pattern, but this is what I did:

I ended up backing up my legitimate JSON files and creating a perl script in a subdirectory that would delete all the JSON files in that directory:

$filepath= "../*.json";
@jsonPattern=glob($filepath);
unlink @jsonPattern;

Then I ran that by cd-ing into that subdir and entering perl nameOfMyScript.perl