Howto: Delete files by inode number

Ever mistakenly pipe output to a file with special characters that you couldn’t remove?

-rw-r–r– 1 eriks eriks 4 2011-02-10 22:37 –fooface

Good luck. Anytime you pass any sort of command to this file, it’s going to interpret it as a flag. You can’t fool rm, echo, sed, or anything else into actually deeming this a file at this point. You do, however, have a inode for every file.

Traditional methods fail:

[eriks@jaded: ~]$ rm -f –fooface
rm: unrecognized option ‘–fooface’
Try rm ./--fooface' to remove the file –fooface’.
Try rm --help' for more information.
[eriks@jaded: ~]$ rm -f '--fooface'
rm: unrecognized option '--fooface'
Try rm ./–fooface’ to remove the file --fooface'.
Try rm –help’ for more information.

So now what, do you live forever with this annoyance of a file sitting inside your filesystem, never to be removed or touched again? Nah.

We can remove a file, simply by an inode number, but first we must find out the file inode number:

$ ls -il | grep foo

Output:

[eriks@jaded: ~]$ ls -il | grep foo
508160 drwxr-xr-x 3 eriks eriks 4096 2010-10-27 18:13 foo3
500724 -rw-r–r– 1 eriks eriks 4 2011-02-10 22:37 –fooface
589907 drwxr-xr-x 2 eriks eriks 4096 2010-11-22 18:52 tempfoo
589905 drwxr-xr-x 2 eriks eriks 4096 2010-11-22 18:48 tmpfoo

The number you see prior to the file permission set is actually the inode # of the file itself.

Hint: 500724 is inode number we want removed.

Now use find command to delete file by inode:

# find . -inum 500724 -exec rm -i {} \;

There she is.

[eriks@jaded: ~]$ find . -inum 500724 -exec rm -i {} \;
rm: remove regular file `./–fooface’? y

And done.

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