can anyone tell me what this is please ''$\033' in terminal

Question

enter image description hereAfter typing ls -alh I came across this, to my way of thinking a directory named ''$\033'. I would like to know if anyone knows what this is?

The owner is root.

I am sorry I have no way of giving you print outs as this is a Linux project with no internet access so can only type answers with me pinkies

SO MORE INFO unless this is some kind of help file i got further information by using command,, cat ''$\30' hear is the out put

mask NAME unmask NAME link Path revert NAME addwants TARGET NAME add-requires TARGET NAME edit NAME get-default set-default NAME

then there are these headings with various input

Machine Commands job Commands Environment Commands Manager lifecycle commands system Commands

Answer 1

It is a one byte filename consisting of just the escape control code, ASCII code octal 33. It was likely accidentally created.

As it is not a printable character, ls has used $'' quotation, which is documented on the bash man page:

Character sequences of the form $'string' are treated as a special variant of single quotes. The sequence expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters in string replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard. Backslash escape sequences, if present, are decoded as follows:

          \a     alert (bell)
          \b     backspace
          \e
          \E     an escape character
          \f     form feed
          \n     new line
          \r     carriage return
          \t     horizontal tab
          \v     vertical tab
          \\     backslash
          \'     single quote
          \"     double quote
          \?     question mark
          \nnn   the eight-bit character whose value is the octal value nnn (one to three octal digits)
          \xHH   the eight-bit character whose value is the hexadecimal value HH (one or two hex digits)
          \uHHHH the Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) character whose value is the hexadecimal value HHHH (one to four hex digits)
          \UHHHHHHHH
                 the Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) character whose value is the hexadecimal value HHHHHHHH (one to eight hex digits)
          \cx    a control-x character

The expanded result is single-quoted, as if the dollar sign had not been present.

Note that the pair of empty single quotes at the beginning is unnecessary and seems to be a bug in ls when the filename starts with an unprintable character. ''$'\033' is more simply just $'\033'.