Deleting a file with illegal characters in the file name

[SiD the Turtle]

Annoyingly, I extracted a tar file destined for a Linux system which contains a file with the name along the lines of foo::bar. If I try to delete the file, I get a file not found message, and I get a syntax error if I try and delete the file through the command prompt. Clearly this is because there are colons in the name. How can I get rid of this?

 

[Raumarik]

can you shove it in a folder on it's own then use a wildcard to remove it? I've done that in the past for a file from a Mac that caused problems.

I just moved the contents of the folder (except the dodgy file), command prompt and did a quick "del *.*"

worked fine for me then.. was a few years ago though!

Alternatively what about renaming it in dos or windows? guessing it won't like that either though.

 

[Dutch777]

Think Unlocker might sort it:

http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

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[superplay]

From a DOS prompt in the directory type

dir /x

This will show you the the filenames in the old dos 8.3 naming format. Then type "del" followed by the "8.3 name" of the file.