FreeBSD: Directory called ^C (really!) - how to remove?
Solution 1:
^V (ctrl+v) works as a kind of escape sequence for the next key-press, inserting the associated value instead of taking whatever action that would normally be associated.
Making use of this, ^V^C (ctrl+v, ctrl+c) ought to work for entering your difficult filename in the terminal.
Solution 2:
You may also remove the file by inode:
$ ls -i1
290742 foo
293246 ^C
$ find . -inum 293246 -delete
Whatever you do, for God's sake, do not put -delete before -inum:
$ touch foo bar baz quux
$ find . -name '*u*' -delete
$ ls
bar baz foo
$ find . -delete -name 'b*'
find: `./baz': No such file or directory
find: `./bar': No such file or directory
$ ls
$
Congratulations, you just wiped out all your files. With find, argument order matters!
Solution 3:
Another option is to use rm -ri ./*; rm will ask you before deleting any file and directory, so you just need to reply y to the "bad" file, and n to all the others.
Actually, in your case you can even cut down the number of replies needed by doing rm -ri ./?, as your "bad" file is just one character long.
Solution 4:
One option is to look up the file name with something other than ls. If you know it was produced by a verbatim Ctrl+C, you can find the ASCII character produced using a table of control characters, or with a more friendly interface like the one provided by Python:
>>> import os
>>> os.listdir('.')
['\x03', ...]
Another option would be to look at a hex dump of the output of ls, using e.g. hexdump.
Then you can delete the file with (for example) this bash command:
rmdir "$(printf '\x03')"
(The double quotes are only needed if the character you're trying to print is in your IFS variable, such as \x20 or \x0A, but it's a good habit to quote command substitutions unless you know you want the shell to perform field splitting, etc.)
Solution 5:
Often in this kind of situations it is easy to come up with a wildcard pattern that matches the relevant file.
In your case, this would be simply ? (matching all file names with precisely one character).
Just check that it really matches what you want:
ls -ld ?
And then remove the directory:
rmdir ?
You can also combine this with tab completion. You can type
rmdir ?
and press tab, and e.g. in bash it will be replaced by
rmdir ^C/
and you can then hit enter and it does what you want.