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I am using following command to check the disk usage in my home direcory.

du -sk * | sort -n

I am getting the following output

273240  AQP
707720  oradiag
3176872 J2EEServer
23628720        var
100000910

I get a directory of size 100000910 without a name in the last line . How can I access/delete this ghost directory in my home directory.

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  • I have only 4 folders in my home directory .I don't know from where I am getting that extra line.
    – g4ur4v
    Nov 9, 2012 at 10:09

4 Answers 4

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The directory name might be composed of space characters (spaces, tabs...). With GNU coreutils (linux standard) use ls -Q which will put the filenames into quotes. Or check with a filemanager like Midnight Commander.

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Maybe the name of the directory is ? (that is a space, or a tab). This is a perfectly correct Unix filename. Why don't you run

ls -Ql

And check for yourself?

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  • 1
    With ls -l, you will be able to see the directory, but no way of know if its one space, to spaces, a tab, etc.
    – jordanm
    Nov 9, 2012 at 14:56
  • good point. I add the -Q option.
    – January
    Nov 9, 2012 at 15:08
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It is possible that the file is composed entirely of non-printable or whitespace characters. You can probably see it using printf '<%q>\n' *.

You should be able to get the inode number using ls -il. After that, you can remove it by using something like find . -xdev -maxdepth 1 -inum 1234 -delete. Given its size, the directory is probably not empty; you can change into it to examine it with cd "$(find . -xdev -maxdepth 1 -inum 1234)" to examine the contents at your leasure.

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I would recommend ls -al see if the file is there as well.

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