file name has become corrupted and i can't rename or delete it

Have you tried changing the protection on the file? This can be done from finder with "Get Info" or from the command line if you are Unix savvy. Give yourself access for R+W and try to rename or delete again, as you choose.

Also, if the file is on the boot disk, boot the recovery partition and re-run the Disk tool from there,

Regards,

Trauts

Can you delete the enclosing folder and restore from a backup that predates the problem?

I have the exact same problem. Somehow the name of one of my files became corrupted and now contains special characters. It looks like this when I display it "00_04_0Ⰷ␀if". When I try deleting it from the finder I get the "The operation can't be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -50)" and when I try to delete it from the terminal I get an "Invalid Argument" error.

I've seen many others on this forum with the same problem but no one has been able to solve it yet. This is not a problem with file permissions or file ownership or the file being in use or anything like that. Disk Utility, TechTool Pro, Disk Warrior, and Hard Disk Manager can't fix the problem. The file can't be deleted, renamed, or moved. You can't delete the enclosing folder because it has this corrupted file in it. Although you can move and rename the enclosing folder. It boils down to the fact that the file system is confused by the special characters in the file name.

Isn't there a Unix Guru somewhere out there that has a clue how to get rid of a file with a corrupted name?

When I saw your predicament I thought of using the inode of the file instead of the file name.

Searching for "delete a file by inode" produces a number of hits, such as this one. I hope it helps.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/delete-remove-files-with-inode-number.html

Luis, I tried your suggestion but it still gives me the "Invalid argument" error. I think the find command is selecting the file based on the inode number but then it is passing the name of the file to the rm command. The rm command can't handle the corrupted file name and fails.

Have you tried to change the directory to the enclosing folder in the Terminal , and with the enclosing folder being the current directory, to delete the offending file with

rm 00*

Does the "00*" wildcard for all filenames starting with "00" work to avoid the "illegal argument"?

Filenames with nul in them cannot be removed from your OS X El Capitan filesystem by any means, including root privileges, disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP), or in El Capitan Recovery mode. Don't bother. Others have spent countless hours and frustration trying.

The solution is to boot from an older version of OS X (e.g. Yosemite), and then you can use root privileges to apply the normal Terminal remove (rm) command on that filename in the El Capitan filesystem.

Here is another shot - using the find command directly to delete the file without calling rm:

find . -inum 123456 -delete

(again, replace 123456 with whatever the inode number is for that file)

It may well fail, but it is not hard to try.

Luis, that doesn't work either. I still get the Invalid argument error:

"find: -delete: unlink(./00_04_0Ⰷ␀if): Invalid argument"

Bingo! VikingOSX has the right answer. After connecting my disk to an older version of OS X (Leopard in my case) I was able to delete the file using the rm command in the Terminal. Thanks.

Some history on this vexing nul filename problem from a prior post. See the link that I provided there, which goes into far more exhaustive attempts at ridding nul filenames from El Capitan, and the solution that I posted here.