How can I remove a file or directory called "\"?

Question

I'm using terminal on a Ubuntu machine and there is a file that I would like to delete. The file's name is \ (just a backslash).

Now usually I would just do

rm filename

However if I do rm \ then it thinks I'm trying to write a multi-line command.

How can I delete this file? I know that I could just use the GUI file system, but that's not very efficient.

So, how can I delete (in terminal) a file called \?

Solution 1

Use rm \\ (escape the backslash with another backslash). Note that this also works similarily, for directories named \ (using either rmdir, or rm with the -r flag).

Example:

>mkdir demo
>cd demo
>touch \\
>ls -l
total 0
-rw-------  1 hennes  users  0 Jul 29 20:25 \
>rm \\
>ls -l
total 0

Solution 2

A general tactic for manually deleting files with awkward characters in their names is

rm -i ./*

This will prompt you to choose whether or not to delete each file in the directory.

Solution 3

You can also unlink by referencing the inode of a file

linus ~/test $ touch \\
linus ~/test $ ls -li
total 0
15204561 -rw-r--r-- 1 pat sudo 0 Jul 29 23:03 \
linus ~/test $ find . -inum 15204561 -exec rm -v {} \;
removed `./\\'
linus ~/test $ ls -li
total 0
linus ~/test $ 

Solution 4

Please check inode of file first . ls -li

137791 -rw-rw-r--. 1 svr svr 366 Mar 11 15:57

inode of "\" is "137791 and then use find command to delete "\" with inode number.

find . -inum 137791 -exec rm -i {} \;

rm: remove regular file `./\'? yes

"\" will be removed then.

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Comments

[ganesh]

Or, single it was a single char. rm -i ./?

[Miguel Tejada]

Yeah. If you can write a more specific glob than ./*, that's always a good idea, especially when doing something destructive.

[evilsoup]

Or, under the same principle, rm '\' (but not rm "\").

[evilsoup]

+1 for prefixing your glob with ./

[Breakthrough]

@evilsoup just to provide some additional clarification on that, the \ character is used as an escape character in double-quote delimited strings. Saying rm "\" will be parsed into an unclosed string, as the second quotation mark is used with an escape character (and thus will be parsed as the double-quote character itself, and not the end of a string). Thus, the terminal will wait until you finish the string with another ". The equivalent method to use double quotes here would be rm "\\" (which is directly equivalent to both rm '\' and rm \\ , as you already confirmed).

[D.A.H]

Best answer! Works!