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I had a really bad idea: Curious about what could happen, I wanted to try to use various non-alphanumerical characters as file names. Think may have been a bad idea. I created the a file in the terminal, using nano:

nano \.sh

I just wrote echo hello in it, and saved it. Then, I made it executable:

chmod +x \.sh

surprisingly, it printed hello when I wrote ./\.sh

Now, I began to get cold feet about this action. Have I broken something? The file does not show up in any file explorer or in ls, except for in search, where it shows up with an icon that looks like a directory with a wire, without any options. (like "open").

What may have been broken by this foolish action, and if so how can I fix the possible damage?

SE - stop firing the good guys
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  • I don't think you broke anything. Can you see it with `ls -a`? Run `rm '\.sh'` to delete your file. – Gasp0de Mar 30 '16 at 13:48
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    You probably actually created a file called `.sh` (the \ would just - harmlessly - escape the `.`) - no more special than any other "dotfile" – steeldriver Mar 30 '16 at 14:08

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I don't believe you have broken anything. Who cares if the files is not displayed. You have found a good way to hide a file. :)

Otherwise hidden file names are the ones with the dot at the beginning (for instance .bashrc).

You can just delete the file with rm ./\\.sh and there will be no trace of your little experiment.

nobody
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  • rm ./\\.sh does not work, (I just used ./ to run it), but rm .sh worked fine. Good to now I have not broken anything :) – SE - stop firing the good guys Mar 30 '16 at 13:53
  • Oohh. I see now! You havent made a \.sh file. You made a .sh file. \ is an escape character in bash. Using \ means that the next character is to be taken literally. For instance if you have a space in your filename you can remove is with `rm "filename with spaces"` or `rm filename\ with\ spaces`. The first example uses "" to make rm aware thatr spaces do not separate multiple filenames or use \\ to use space literally. You could have deleted it with `rm .sh` too. – nobody Mar 30 '16 at 13:58