Delete files with special characters in filenames

Question

I need to delete old files with special characters in filenames like space,,,(,),! and so on via PHP. Classic unlink($filename) does not work for these files. How can I transform filenames to filenames which accepts unlink function and filesystem? It's running on a Solaris machine and I don't have another access to it.

Answer 1

How are you constructing the $filename? unlink should work on any filename with special characters if you do the normal escaping on it. e.g.

for a file with a name of this has, various/wonky !characters in it, then

 $filename = 'this has\, various\/wonky \!characters in it';
 unlink($filename);

should work.

Answer 2

unlink accepts any valid string and will try to delete the file in that string.

unlink('/home/user1/"hello(!,');

Perhaps you are not properly escaping certain characters.

Answer 3

You can also find all needed files and unlink them using RegexIterator:

<?php

$dir  = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('.');
$iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator($dir);
$regex = new RegexIterator($iterator, '/(^.*[\s\.\,\(\)\!]+.*)/', RecursiveRegexIterator::GET_MATCH);

foreach ($regex as $file) {
        if (is_file($file[0])) {
                print "Unlink file {$file[0]}\n";
                unlink($file[0]);
        }
}

This code snippet recursively traverse all directories from current ('.') and matches all files by regex '/(^.[\s\,.()!]+.)/', then delete them.

Answer 4

The way I do it in Linux is to use absolute paths, like "rm ./filename" that is dot slash.

You can also use escape charachters. Like "rm \-filename" that is - backspash hyphen.