Delete a file called '.env'$'\r' I have no idea what created this file - I guess a terrible shell script. It is called `'.env'$'\r'` I have tried various versions of `rm`, and the technique of opening the direcory with `vim ./`, selecting the file, and Shift-D to delete. This didn't work, failing with a **warning** (netrw) delete(/root/squawker/.env) failed! NetrwMessage [RO] "NetrwMessage" --No lines in buffer-- How can I delete this pesky file? This is on Ubuntu 20.04

On recent-ish Linux systems (with GNU tools as in most desktop distributions), `ls` prints names with weird characters using the shell's quoting syntax. If that `'.env'$'\r'` is what `ls` gives, the name of the file is `.env`, where `` is the carriage-return character. You could get that if you had a shell script with Windows line-endings that ran e.g. `whatever > .env`.

The good thing here is that the output of `ls` there is directly usable as input to the shell. Well, to Bash, ksh, and zsh at least, not a standard POSIX sh, like Debian/Ubuntu's `/bin/sh`, Dash.

So try with just


rm -f '.env'$'\r'


Of course `rm -f .env?` should also work to remove anything named `.env` plus any one character.

Now, of course it's also possible that the filename is literally that, what with the single quotes and backslashes. But that's more difficult to achieve by accident. Even so, `rm -f *.env*` should work to delete anything with `.env` in the name.