I have files which continue to appear in Apache but can not be deleted because they supposedly do not exist.

April 30, 2004 11:47 AM

FTP help: I have some files on an external server (Apache) that I am unable to delete because "there is no such file or directory". Yet, mysteriously, they remain. [mi]

I've Googled without finding a solution. I think it may have something to do with the file names -- they were created by an old mac user and have spaces and extra periods in them. I can't do anything to them -- move them, rename them, what have you. I've tried with multiple FTP clients and from multiple locations.

Any thoughts?

posted by o2b to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Which clients? Have you tried a command line client yet?
posted by namespan at 11:55 AM on April 30, 2004

SSH to the account with putty and remove them. Also, the webserver has nothing to do with the files.
posted by the fire you left me at 12:01 PM on April 30, 2004

Use a command-line ftp client, and enclose the filenames in double quotes.
posted by fuzz at 12:05 PM on April 30, 2004

Response by poster: Aaaaahhh, I feel clean now. Thanks for the help.

For the record, I tried Putty first and it worked like a charm. Also for the record, Putty revealed that the file names in question had a space as the first character, which seemed to be the culprit.
posted by o2b at 12:17 PM on April 30, 2004

TFYLM: Did you catch that the rm(1) manpage you linked to was a joke manpage griping about the ADA programming language? Took me a few looks too...
posted by tss at 2:46 PM on May 1, 2004