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I have a file named ''$'\t' in my directory. How do I delete it? (I suspect the outermost pair of quotes is not part of the filename.)

Norbert S
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1 Answers1

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I suspect the outermost pair of quotes is not part of the filename

I suspect the filename is just a single tab character. I think you gave us the output of ls. Compare Why is ls suddenly wrapping items with spaces in single quotes? In your case ls goes even further and uses ANSI-C quoting ($'…') to denote the tab character as \t.

If you type exactly rm ''$'\t' (in Bash or another shell that supports $'…') and hit Enter then you will remove the file. The two leading single-quote characters enclose an empty string and they can be omitted. I used the literal string you got from ls, but it could as well be $'\t'.

Alternatively (if your shell does not support $'…') rm 'Ctrl+v,Tab' should allow you to put a tab character inside single-quotes. This command should also work.

Kamil Maciorowski
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  • Thanks! The first method worked in bash, but it didn't work in tcsh. – Norbert S Apr 06 '22 at 10:14
  • In tcsh, `rm "\`printf '\t'\`"` should work at least in this particular case. `printf` should support the same escapes as `$'...'` quotes do, but of course it'll treat `%` specially. – ilkkachu Apr 06 '22 at 10:20