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theTuxRacer
Asked: 2011-02-16 02:36:37 +0800 CST

Removing folder named ~

  • 772

This is the output of ls -l

ls -l
total 53484
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root     4096 2011-02-10 05:59 ~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54313810 2011-02-13 05:09 jobs.jar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   384035 2011-02-15 05:33 jobsLog.out

I can't do rm -rf ~ because that will remove my home directory.

What should I do? Its not a problem for me, but just an eye-sore.

bash

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    rm -R ./~

    That will make it look for ~ in the current folder.

    • 60

  2. I've made silly mistakes with rm before so here are a few tips I've learnt over the years to try and keep you data safe from accidents:

    1. Use a graphical solution like Nautilus. Soft-delete it to the trash. Then when you know you haven't moved your $HOME into the trash (everything would have started crashing and looking funky), empty your trash.

    2. Move instead of delete. Rename the directory with mv, eg:

      mv ./\~ ./a-nice-sensible-directory-name

      Then delete it.

    3. If in doubt, use the -i flag when dealing with potential fubars. It will prompt you for every file removed and should let you very quickly know if something bad is going to happen.

      oli@bert:~/Desktop$ rm -rfi ./del/
rm: descend into directory `./del'? y
rm: remove regular file `./del/output2.pdf'?
    • 44

  3. Brilliant problem :)

    You can delete the directory by escaping the tilde:

    rm -rf \~

    This works for all sorts of special characters.

    • 19

  4. You can simply cake the folder name into apostrophes:

     rm '~'
    • 17

  5. Just another, a little more complex, way to do it is using inode numbers:

    $ ls -li
total 24
 7146369 drwxr-xr-x   4 user  staff   136 Jan 19 21:50 ~
$ find . -xdev -inum 7146369 -exec rm -rf {} \;

    Pros

    • It works with wathever fancy name you can have.
    • Should be safe because inode numbers are unique (-xdev: Don't descend directories on other filesystems) and you can test the search first, just in case, removing -exec rm -rf {} \;.

    Cons

    • Doing find . in a directory with a lot of files and/or directories will take a lot of time, and disk reading.
    • 6