I am running Linux Debian Stable which is working fine. But I have a file on an ext4 partition which has an abnormal character in it. Now I cannot rename this file, nor can I delete it (even as root through sudo). This file also does not open (its supposed to be a pdf file). The 'cat' command with this file's name produces the response: : No such file or directory

I tried scanning the partition with the command: sudo e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sda5 . It finished without reporting any error.

How can I remove this file? Thanks for your help.

What is the name of the file, which character is causing the issues? I usually press tab and let the shell's autocomplete take care of oddly-named files -- either that or use quotes or wildcards where appropriate (for example rm *.pdf).

Its image is as follows (a question mark in a black diamond):

/\
|?|
\/

I paste it here as text but it does not appear in the post:

The image of this character is at: http://imgur.com/cAEkcoW

The full file name is: "Eur Heart J-2000-Widimsk!-823-31_PRAGUE-study.pdf"

The abnormal character is after Eur Heart J-2000-Widimsk and before -823-31_PRAGUE-study.pdf I have denoted that place with an '!'

Have you tried using shell autocomplete? Do you have a GUI file manager you could try?

The character in question is most likely a non-ASCII character encoded in an unexpected encoding. The "convmv" command can help with renaming the file and converting to the default encoding at the same time. The default encoding should be "UTF-8" nowadays.

Can you rename or delete it with mc? Or with any graphical file manager?

Good ideas above.

Be sure to do an ls -l to be sure you aren't looking at a link.

sudo rm *.pdf assuming there is only one pdf.

I do think that maybe there is something going on.


Wonder if booting to a live cd would detect it.

Where is forcerm?

I removed all other files from that folder and then tried 'rm *.pdf' and it worked!

Earlier I had tried command rm "<name of file copied from terminal or from dolphin file manager>" and it was not working.

It was not getting renamed in GUI Dolphin file manager (KDE).

Thanks everyone for help.