Can not delete files containing special characters in the file name

Question

I use Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and I have a directory with many files, among them these two files:

./baer.jpg
./bär.jpg

I would like to delete bär.jpg but I can't.

If I type rm b and hit TAB, it shows me both files, if I append ä and hit TAB, nothing gets displayed.

What must me done in order to delete bär.jpg?

Deleting the parent folder is not a solution for me, as there are plenty of files in this directory that are used by a productive environment.

Answer 1

I just found out how to delete such files witch special characters:

1. cd <directory with that file>
2. ls -ali
3. At the very left of the directory listing you see the ID of the inode of each file.

4. Delete your file via inode ID:

   find . -inum <inode ID of your file> -exec rm -i {} \;

This worked fine for my issue. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Well, you can try using matching via grep to delete the file if it's a single problematic file.

neal@dsadsa:~$ touch junk_ä_deleteme
neal@dsadsa:~$ ls | grep junk | grep deleteme | xargs rm

Here, I am creating a file named junk_ä_deleteme. I delete it afterward by matching characters before ("junk") and after ("deleteme") the funny symbol. This approach isn't very good, but if it is a single file, it might work.

Perhaps a better solution would be to form a regex to match your file, and then pipe that filename to rm.