finder – Methods to take away a file which title appears to be “.” on an SMB share?

Overview

Incorrect specification of an argument in a commandline instrument (particulars beneath) has led to the creation of a file actually named “.”. I’ve already came upon that immediately attempting to delete in Finder will set off deletion of all content material within the containing folder (luckily it is a non permanent folder), however nonetheless not the “.” file itself. Furthermore, no folders containing this file could be efficiently deleted, neither with Finder nor from bash/zsh shell.

How can one truly delete (or rename) such a file?

Makes an attempt to delete from zsh

For instance:

mytmp % ls -hal
whole 65
drwx------  1 consumer  workers    16K Aug 21 11:20 .
-rwx------  1 consumer  workers     0B Aug 21 09:51 .
drwx------  1 consumer  workers    16K Aug 16 16:30 ..

mytmp % ls -aB
.   .   ..

mytmp % rm -rf '.'                   
rm: "." and ".." will not be eliminated

mytmp % cd ..

scratch % rm -rf mytmp
rm: mytmp: Permission denied

scratch % sudo rm -rf mytmp
rm: mytmp: Permission denied

I’ve additionally tried variations with out -r, since actually it’s the non-directory model that’s to be deleted.

I moreover tried the suggestion of @bmike to use the inode. Whereas we are able to determine the inode, the deletion doesn’t seem to work:

scratch % ls -ila mytmp
whole 65
8056451580272514705 drwx------  1 consumer  workers  16384 Aug 21 11:20 .
8652239633868421122 -rwx------  1 consumer  workers      0 Aug 21 09:51 .
                  2 drwx------  1 consumer  workers  16384 Aug 21 11:43 ..

scratch % discover mytmp -inum 8652239633868421122 -delete

## no change
scratch % ls -ila mytmp
whole 65
8056451580272514705 drwx------  1 consumer  workers  16384 Aug 21 11:20 .
8652239633868421122 -rwx------  1 consumer  workers      0 Aug 21 09:51 .
                  2 drwx------  1 consumer  workers  16384 Aug 21 11:43 ..

Is it actually named “.”?

@nohillside proposed to delimit the listings with x and y to see if it actually is called “.”. From bash:

bash-3.2$ for i in .*; do echo x${i}y; carried out
x.y
x.y
x..y

Seems so.

@fd0 advised printing non-printing characters with cat -vet. From bash:

bash-3.2$ ls -1a | cat -vet
.$
.$
..$

Once more, appears identically named.

@nohillside Prompt working a Python server from the listing and show its listing itemizing:

Extra Background

The folder is on a community Quantity, format SMB (OS X).

The instrument that resulted on this was haplogrep, a Java-based CLI. One can set up it by Conda by way of

conda set up -c conda-forge -c bioconda haplogrep

The subcommand used was haplogrep classify, which has the next choices:

mytmp % haplogrep classify

mtDNA Haplogroup Classifiction v2.4.0
https://github.com/seppinho/haplogrep-cmd
(c) Sebastian Schönherr, Hansi Weissensteiner, Lukas Forer, Dominic Pacher
[email protected]

[classify]
Lacking required choices: '--input=<in>', '--output=<out>', '--format=<format>'
Utilization: haplogrep classify [--chip] [--extend-report] [--rsrs]
                          [--skip-alignment-rules] [--write-fasta]
                          [--write-fasta-msa] --format=<format>
                          [--hetLevel=<hetLevel>] [--hits=<hits>] --in=<in>
                          [--lineage=<lineage>] [--metric=<metric>] --out=<out>
                          [--phylotree=<tree>]
      --chip                VCF knowledge from a genotype chip
                              Default: false
      --extend-report       Add flag for a prolonged remaining output
                              Default: false
      --format=<format>     Specify enter file format: vcf, fasta or hsd
      --hetLevel=<hetLevel> Add heteroplasmies with a degree > X from the VCF
                              file to the profile (default: 0.9)
      --hits=<hits>         Calculate finest n hits
      --in, --input=<in>    Enter VCF, fasta or hsd file
      --lineage=<lineage>   Export lineage info as dot file, n0=no
                              tree, 1=with SNPs, 2=solely construction, no SNPs
      --metric=<metric>     Specifiy different metrics (hamming or jaccard) than
                              default (kulczynski)
      --out, --output=<out> Output file location
      --phylotree=<tree>    Specify phylotree model
      --rsrs                Use RSRS Model
                              Default: false
      --skip-alignment-rules
                            Skip mtDNA nomenclature fixes primarily based on guidelines for
                              FASTA import
                              Default: false
      --write-fasta         Write leads to fasta format
                              Default: false
      --write-fasta-msa     Write a number of sequence alignment (_MSA.fasta)
                              Default: false

I misinterpreted the “Output file location” description of the --out argument as asking for a path, main me to make use of --out . and thus leading to making a file named “.”.

Renaming

The file itself can’t be renamed in Finder or with mv, nonetheless, the containing folder could be renamed.