Question

I accidentally have created some folders on server with a function and instead of using “/” I used this “\”. Now the folders are like this : “folder\MartonMihaiBusinessCard” .

I cannot delete them anymore. What can I do about this ?

Answer 1

Because you used PHP to create them, they’re likely owned by some funky user like “nobody” or “apache”. So, you’ll have to use PHP to delete them, too.

This doesn’t work out of the box with filenames containing backslashes, as you’ve found. This is because the backslash is treated as an “escape” character in PHP. Something like “my\new\file” will actually contain a linebreak and a carriage feed.

However, if you escape the backslash– with another backslash!– you’ll be able to point PHP at the file.

rmdir("/path/to/the/folder\\MartonMihaiBusinessCard");

(or unlink() if it’s actually a file, I wasn’t clear on that) should do what you seek.