I recently ran into a problem where a whole bunch of strange filenames with strange characters appeared in a home directory in linux.  Because the filenames had wildcards in the naming, it was a little tricky to delete them.  For instance say you have a file named   m?v?.   I initially thought I could use perl and stat to get narrow them down and unlink them.  However, the stat did not seem to return any data on these strange files.  My next idea was to use the octal display,   if you run a  ls -b   to display the file in octal you might see something like m\173v\002  to delete this you would type  rm m$’\373′v$’\002′     however, I ran into some filenames that still had strange characters with octal display.  My final solution was a windows / linux mix.  Since they were all created a specific time, the easy solution was to open up the directory in windows via Samba and then just sort by time, select, and delete.  This did the trick.