find . -inum 12345 -print0 | xargs -0 rm

File names in these cases might accidentally contain a newline.

I also find this in .inputrc to be a invaluable:

“\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward

It makes up and down keys do history searches e.g. type "sudo " then [up] and it will search through everything in history that starts with “sudo ” — a lot more useful than the default ‘up key’ behaviour.

Control-o: menu-complete

Now tab will still do normal completion as far as it can, control-o will cycle through remaining options. This allows to get to the file you want without having to type funny chars.

Karl

To delete a file who’s file name is a pain to define (eg. ^H^H^H) find it’s inode number with the command “ls -il”. Use the line below to find and delete the file.

find . -inum 12345 | xargs rm

- Try another shell, autocompletion for zsh (or whas it ksh) works differently than the one in bash
- mc
- a simple oneliner that adds kind of an index in front of the file name, something like

j=1; for i in *; do echo mv “$i” “$(printf %.2i $j)_$i”; j=$((j+1)); done

Remove the “echo” if you like the way it works to do the real thing. You can alias it, and that way at least you don’t have to depend on a file manager to rename your files and be able to reference them. This is the solution I usually use.