Linux Tip of the Day – Renaming unprintable directories

This happened just the other day, and wanted to make it available.

We discovered a directory with no name or unprintable characters:

foohost# ls -ail

208978 drwxr-xr-x 1 2430 Aug 3 13:08

209299 drwxr-xr-x 24 3287 Oct 25 1993 .

208946 drwxr-xr-x 49 447 Jun 22 1993 ..

Using the ‘-i’ option in ls provided the inode of the directory. We then were able to move the directory to another name so we could see what was in it using a find command:

foohost# find . -inum 208946 -exec mv {} new.dir \;

Worked like a charm.