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I am running Linux Mint.I tried to copy a file with the file manager. It looked like it hung. I can see the file in the directory with ls -l:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 mike domain^users 20 Mar 1 08:57 'output (copy 1).txt'

It has char quotes around it. However, I cannot move it, remove it, cat, etc. For any of these commands, I get a similar error message. For rm *, I get:

rm: cannot remove 'output (copy 1).dat':No such file or directory.

I moved every other file out of the directory except this one and tried rm * and rm -f *. Same error.

I tried

$ rm "'output (copy 1).dat'"
rm: cannot remove ''\''output (copy 1).dat'\''': No such file or directory

I tried

$ mv * test
mv: cannot move 'output (copy 1).txt' to 'test': No such file or directory.

I can't rmdir, it says the directory is not empty.

Ideas?

terdon
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mshepard
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    What is the exact command you are using to remove output (copy1).dat? – jesse_b Mar 01 '19 at 14:46
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    Possibly related: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/258679/237982 – jesse_b Mar 01 '19 at 14:48
  • No. Same error with escape backslashes. – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 14:49
  • I tried rm 'output (copy 1).dat', then emptied the directory and tried rm * and rm -f *. No success – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 14:51
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    Show the command you're using. [Edit] your question. – Kusalananda Mar 01 '19 at 14:51
  • Emptied of all files except this file – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 14:54
  • What is the output of: for f in *; do echo "$f"; done when run in that directory? – jesse_b Mar 01 '19 at 14:57
  • group name seems a bit peculiar, if you didn't mess /etc/group you might have a faulty filesystem. have you tried fsck (File System Consistency Check) it ? – Archemar Mar 01 '19 at 14:57
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    What commands did you use? – Kusalananda Mar 01 '19 at 15:00
  • I just tried the for f in *; do echo "$f"; done The result is output (copy 1).dat with no quotes. – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 15:01
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    @mshepard: Cool, so I think it's safe to say the quotes have been added by ls. Now it would help if you edit your question to include all of the commands you have tried so far and the error messages that each gave. – jesse_b Mar 01 '19 at 15:03
  • I edited the question to include what I consider the most important command: rm * As noted in the comments, I tried rm with double quotes around the single quote file name. It still says no such file or directory. Are there other commands that may be of use? – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 15:06
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    You just mentioned a file called output (copy 1).dat in comments, but in the question you have output (copy1).dat. This is different. Try removing the directory that holds this file (assuming you'd want to remove everything in this directory) with rm -rf dirname, where dirname is the name of the directory. – Kusalananda Mar 01 '19 at 15:14
  • I tried rm -rf processes (that's the folder) and got rm: cannot remove 'processes': Directory not empty. – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 15:21
  • What Unix are you actually running here? You've tagged it with Linux. Are you on an embedded system? An error message from rm usually does not contain the word rmdir. – Kusalananda Mar 01 '19 at 15:23
  • Sorry - I mistyped at first. – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 15:26
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    SOLVED: The directory was on a network drive. I connected to it with a windows 10 machine and had no problem deleting the file. Thanks for all your suggestions. – mshepard Mar 01 '19 at 15:50

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