junk characters in file names

[cxc143]

CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core)
XFS filesystem, root vol (not in a volume group) is nearly full, have 3 files with what I would call junk characters as names, taking up a fair amount of space.
They are:

Ҕ?$
-????
?Q??

My initial thought was corruption, booted into single user mode and ran xfs_repair, which found no errors. System shuts down, and boots w/o issue.
I was reluctant to try to delete these "filenames", without some idea of what they might be, but do I have any other options at this point?

thanks

[aks]

Well that's worrying.
You have characters that seem to be not UTF8 complaint (by default CentOS is UTF8). Windows in the other hand is UTF16 (which may match the issues you describe, that's a clue).
The naive way is to rename the files and see what breaks (hard to test).
I know in the Windows world, "corruption" often exists as a excuse (I think it's very real and often expensive bugs). In over 20 years of Linux, I've never seen true "corruption".

[pjsr2]

Try the "file" command and see if it gives you a information on what type of content these files have.

Code: Select all

file *

[cxc143]

Resolved, sort of.

So using the file command threw back a syntax error just with the garbage file name as well as using -- <filename>

I ended up listing the problem files by inode, and deleted via the inode number. Rebooted the server, came up clean, and apps seem to be functioning normally, no data loss identified or app issues.

Thanks

[desertcat]

Resolved, sort of.

So using the file command threw back a syntax error just with the garbage file name as well as using -- <filename>

I ended up listing the problem files by inode, and deleted via the inode number. Rebooted the server, came up clean, and apps seem to be functioning normally, no data loss identified or app issues.

Thanks

A Trivia Question: When I see files names with Junk Characters it say to me either a) file corruption b) intentionally hidden file. Are any of these files Encrypted Files?!?