can't remove dir ") and _REMOTE_USER_") from failed install

bambino59 · 10-17-2006, 11:01 AM

Sometime back, I had a failed install of phpmyadmin on a rh9 machine.
I just noticed that I have 2 strange directories in /home and I can't seem to open the dir's, delete them, or do anything with them.

The 2 dirs are:
/home/")
and
/home/_REMOTE_USER_")

I am generally always remote to my network when installing anything.

When I cd "), I get this prompt:
>
Cntrl C pulls me back out.
The same happens with both dirs as su and su -

Can anyone tell me something about these dirs???
Thanks

matthewg42 · 10-17-2006, 11:14 AM

The problem is that the shell interprets " as a special character. You can tell the shell to use a literal " by prefixing the character with a backslash \, like this:

Code:

$ cd /home/\"

A bracket is also a special character in the shell, so you should prefix a \ there too:

Code:

$ cd /home/\"\)

Another way to do the same thing is to single-quote the string. Note this is the ' character, not the backtick, `:

Code:

$ cd '/home/")'

The only thing you can't have inside a single-quoted string is a single quote.

For a full description of special characters and quoting I recommend you read the QUOTING section of the bash manual page.

bambino59 · 10-17-2006, 11:31 AM

Thanks so much.....your suggestion worked perfectly.
It turned out as I suspected.....those dir's were
built by a failed install.

Thanks again for your assistance.