Issues removing files with certain characters in their names.

Ralf Friedl Ralf.Friedl at online.de
Fri May 30 19:45:48 UTC 2014


Jason Cipriani wrote:
> I just want to bring to attention a potential issue, described here:
>
> http://superuser.com/questions/587778/cant-delete-file-with-foreign-letters
>
> It seems at least two users (the original poster and also this post 
> <http://superuser.com/a/759520/245945>) were unable to remove a file 
> that contained certain foreign characters in the filename, both using 
> BusyBox.
>
> In one case a user resorted to setting up a samba server then deleting 
> the file remotely from Windows. In the other case the discovered 
> workaround was to "rm -i *" and answer no to all files except the 
> problematic one.
>
> Not sure if this is BusyBox-specific issue, user error, or something 
> else, and I don't have BusyBox to test, but I thought it was 
> significant that both users with that problem were using it and am 
> reporting it here in case anybody is interested in investigating.
>
This issue has nothing to do with busybox, it is related to the kernel 
and to non Linux file systems. A Linux file system should be able to use 
anything as the filename that doesn't exceed the length for a file entry 
and doesn't contain '/' or '\0'. It should provide back the exactly the 
same string with readdir. The kernel also make no assumption about an 
encoding of the file names.

When accessing other file systems, especially FAT and NTFS, this is not 
true, but it is not a problem busybox can solve. The kernel should be 
able to access and delete the files it has created on such a file system 
with the same settings, but there is no guarantee that the files on such 
a file system have been created with the same settings, of even by a 
Linux kernel. In the case of NTFS, it is now common to use the userspace 
NTFS file system, so it is not really a kernel issue.

Files are stored as UCS-2 on NTFS and VFAT but not on regular FAT file 
systems. In this case NTFS is mentioned, but no information on mount 
options and in general not enough information to reproduce the problem.


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