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[–] 20 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Tab Completion if you're unsure how to escape characters in this case. Start the name of the folder, then hit TAB a couple times

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    ⬆️⬆️⬆️This⬆️⬆️⬆️

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (19 children)

    Fish is the command line shell your using (similar to bash). Usaslly the $ symbol perceeds a variable name, hence the error. Do you have a folder with a $ in the name?

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 months ago (17 children)

    'folder'$'\003'

    That's the name of the folder.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    What does ls show?

    you can escape special charcters with \ something like \'folder\'\$\'\\003\' might work

    be careful with rm -rf as you might delete your entire disk if done badly. use some other command to test if it targets the correct directory like ls \'folder\'\$\'\\003\'

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago*

    Yep as others have noted put a \ in front of each special character. The \ tells the system to treat the following character as a alphanumeric character in the string and not as a operator or a command. Since ', $ and \ are all special characters you will need a \ just before each when typing this name. Also as mentioned do this with a benign command like ls first to make sure your only acting on that specific directory or you might have a bad day.

    Edit: How the heck did you get some of those folder names? Looks like a script with incorrect variable/macro substitution made these.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    ‘folder’$‘\003’

    Oh that is unpleasantly fiddly to insert all the backslashes to escape the bits. Testing here, (fiddly to even make a dir called that, lol), for fun, instead of just pressing tab, ... is it just the $ and the \ you need to escape? and the ' are fine? Results here are inconclusive, not sure I managed to make a file with the same name, it showing here with extra outer '.

    Probably easier to just interactively.... but yeah, in case needing to have it written for a script... probably easiest still to just press tab, to see how it arranges the escape syntax, and paste that into your script. ;)

    The fi in fish is friendly interactive, after all.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    I believe u should Type

    rm -r \'folder\'\$\'\\003\'
    

    Basically a \ interprets the following character as a character. With the ' I’m not sure, so maybe

    rm -r 'folder'\$'\\003'
    

    could do the trick too

    Edit: correct code

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  • [–] [S] -2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    VyxDqcxlLm2L7Xj.png

    After doing the step, the cursor simply came in the centre.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    there is a space between your first \ and the ' that doesn't belong there. (The backslash escapes the space, but not the apostrophe, that's why it's coloured red and not cyan)

    Press Ctrl+C and try again with the corrected command.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (9 children)

    Are the hyphens apostrophes and the backslash part of the folder name too?

    If so, try \'folder\'\$\'\\003\' escaping the hyphens apostrophes ', the dollar sign $ and the backslash \.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Do you see the folder with the strange name here ?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Oh hey, seeing that has just given me another idea (not sure if anyone else mentioned this yet elsewhere further down in the conversation... but...)

    Tried just using a unique portion of the name that's easy to type, along with asterisks for the rest? e.g. rmdir *old*00* (or rm -r if it's not an empty dir you want rid of).

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    As the other commenters and I have mentioned, you should try escaping any of the special characters ', $, and \ by a backslash, i.e. \', \$ and \\

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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
    
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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Can you not rm -rf then tab and select the folder automatically formatted as needed?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    As others have said, tab-complete should be able to do it. If not, here are two other options:

    Is it the only "folder*" in the directory?

    $  ls *folder*
    ‘folder’$‘003’
    

    If you only have that, you should be able to use the wildcards to delete it:

    rm *folder*
    

    Another is just find the inode and delete using that:

    $  ls -li | grep folder
    5120013  .rw-rw-r-- user user  0 B  Fri Jun 19 21:09:02 2026 ‘folder’$‘003’
    
    $ find . -inum 5120013 -delete
    
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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Nobody's getting into the real issue lol. Yes, yes, tab completion. But all you need to do is escape the dollar sign: \$. Or include it inside the single quotes.

    👍👍

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