I am using Neon-on-Kubuntu 16.04, and I have a small, irritating problem which doesn't seem to affect my day-to-day operation. I am trying to delete two things: one is an old PDF file in my home folder, and the other is an old kde folder (named '.kde.old') which is contained in the Trash folder. The PDF file looks suspicious because it has a question mark in the title which was originally not there, and there are 0 bytes in the file, according to properties. When I try to delete it, I get the error message that the file in question does not exist and therefore cannot be deleted, yet the name of the file does not disappear from the list in the home directory. The .kde.old file gives no further explanation other than it cannot be deleted. Is there something wrong here, or are these just little glitches that can be easily fixed with the right Konsole commands?
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Why not hit F4 in Dolphin when in the directory(ies) of the offending files to drop to a terminal and hit 'ls' and see if the terminal shows the files? If they show up, and you want to remove them, just type
sudo rm 'filename' -
Didn't work for the pdf file. Says there's no file there. But there still is a marker (a title). I've had this incident before, with two short videos from my phone. In both cases, the videos had a black question mark enclosed within a rombus, and neither could be deleted, even though properties said they didn't exist. If they don't exist, why is the name of the file still there? And with a mysterious question mark? As for the .kde.old archive, it's there but can't be deleted from Trash. Weird.Comment
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my favorite tool for such problems is mc ("midnight commander"), a terminal file manager/editor. Run it using sudo."A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
– John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.Comment
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The displayed question mark 'within a rombus' is a placeholder for a character that cannot be interpreted by the OS. To delete such files (usually/normally) you use a wildcard for the character(s). So, say the file name you see is along the lines of somewe?rdf?le.pdf. From the command line type: rm somewe?rdf?le.pdfOriginally posted by oldgeek View Post
In this example, the ? mark you type is a single-character wildcard for the position it occupies.Windows no longer obstructs my view.
Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007.
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock HolmesComment
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maybe delete with sudo Konqueror
woodjustathoughtsmokeComment
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They are in trash and you are trying to delete them? They were probably either deleted by root or are corrupted. In the terminal, cd to /.local/share/Trash/files and use sudo to remove them:
You could also open dolphin as root user and delete them that way:Code:sudo rm filename
Code:kdesudo dolphin
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Thanks to all. In the end, I had Midnight Commander installed and so used that. Now the 'offending' files are gone. And thanks Snowhog for clearing up the question mark bit.Comment
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