Some files have '?' at the end of the file name, and I need to find such files

Question

I don't have any idea how these files came about to be, but here's what it looks like with ls -lh:

total 8.1G
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1.6G Apr 13  2022 test_some_data_S6_R2.fastq.gz?
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1.5G Apr 13  2022 test_some_data_S6_R1.fastq.gz

When I use ls to get the file name to auto-complete, it looks like this -

ls /path/to/file/test_some_data_S6_R2.fastq.gz^M

^M is supposed to be carrier return in DOS, so my best guess, someone might have copied the name from a Windows system and used that for naming the file. There are plenty of methods to replace ^M in the contents of the file, but in my case I want to find files with ^M in its name.

I tried find /path/with/files/ -iname "^M", but no luck. I tried to escape with \, but still no dice. I'm SSHing into a RHEL machine using MobaXTerm, so I tried Windows shortcut CTRL + Q, CTRL + M, but it hides the current working window, and doesn't insert ^M.

Answer 1

In bash, you can use $'\r' to insert the ^M control character.

find /path/with/files -name '*'$'\r'

• iname is not needed as the glob expression doesn't contain any letters
• an asterisk must be included to match the name before the ^M

I was even able to enter ^M directly to a bash command line by the combination of Ctrl + v Ctrl + m. The actual key might depend on bind and its assignment of quoted-insert.

find /path/with/files -name '*^M'

Answer 2

Here is a small variation on the method that @choroba posted in their answer.

In a text editor create a small script (called myscript here) that looks like this

#!/bin/bash
find . -name "*^M" -print0 | xargs -0 ls 

The only trick here is that you need to insert the character ^M literally, and there are special tricks for doing so depending on the text editor. In vi or vim it is ctrl-K. In emacs it is ctrl-Q. Use what ever is needed.

Then make the script executable:

chmod 755 myscript

Then execute the script ./myscript. It should just list the files ending with the ^M character. If it does what you want change the xargs -0 ls to xargs -0 rm -f and execute the script again to remove the files