I am trying to get rid of this folder, but the result is saying that fish expects a variable name after this $. What does it mean ? And how do i get rid of this folder ? (thelemmy.club)

submitted 2 months ago by OrangePumkin@piefed.nl to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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[-] sjohannes@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

Is this homework of some sort?

By default, GNU ls will quote entries containing certain special or unprintable characters. For example, if a file name contains the space character, GNU ls will print e.g. 'hello world'. This quoting is done using Bash syntax.

In Bash, 'folder'$'\003' (or $'folder\003') represents the text folder followed by octal byte 3. Because you use Fish instead of Bash, this doesn't work—it has a different syntax to specify unprintable/special characters.

I can tell you how to refer to this file in Fish, but I hesitate to do it if it's for homework. What I will do is point you to the part of the Fish documentation where this is (kind of) explained: in Fish for bash users#Quoting.

[-] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Would it help to use ls --literal --show-control-chars to find out if \003 is indeed the representation of a special character?

[-] sjohannes@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The default output itself is pretty definitive, assuming you are indeed using GNU ls and don't have the QUOTING_STYLE environment variable set. https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Formatting-the-file-names.html explains all this (including your options) and more.

$ touch $'folder\x03'
$ ls --quoting-style shell-escape  # the default
'folder'$'\003'
$ ls --quoting-style c
"folder\003"
$ ls --quoting-style escape
folder\003

[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

I wouldn't expect homework to use fish. It seems a less useful and niche as a learning exercise.

this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026

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