Just type rm -rf f and use tab to auto complete.

It's just not escaped properly.

You can probably just get away with putting a backslash \ before the $ so it looks like \$.

The quotes and escapes are mangled.

cd into the directory with the folder to remove, type rm -rf ./ then press tab until the folder you’re looking for is autocompleted after the ./

Are you sure the name is 'folder'$'\003'? I think the outer quotes might be added by ls. I would try rm -rf 'folder\'\$\'\\003'

Edit: Or rm -rf 'folder\'$\'\\003'

Ask loveespresso@retrofed.com.

You probably don't own the folder. Use sudo.

Tab Completion if you're unsure how to escape characters in this case. Start the name of the folder, then hit TAB a couple times

Fish is the command line shell your using (similar to bash). Usaslly the $ symbol perceeds a variable name, hence the error. Do you have a folder with a $ in the name?

Is this homework of some sort?

By default, GNU ls will quote entries containing certain special or unprintable characters. For example, if a file name contains the space character, GNU ls will print e.g. 'hello world'. This quoting is done using Bash syntax.

In Bash, 'folder'$'\003' (or $'folder\003') represents the text folder followed by octal byte 3. Because you use Fish instead of Bash, this doesn't work­—it has a different syntax to specify unprintable/special characters.

I can tell you how to refer to this file in Fish, but I hesitate to do it if it's for homework. What I will do is point you to the part of the Fish documentation where this is (kind of) explained: in Fish for bash users#Quoting.

Can you not rm -rf then tab and select the folder automatically formatted as needed?

As others have said, tab-complete should be able to do it. If not, here are two other options:

Is it the only "folder*" in the directory?

$  ls *folder*
‘folder’$‘003’

If you only have that, you should be able to use the wildcards to delete it:

rm *folder*

Another is just find the inode and delete using that:

$  ls -li | grep folder
5120013  .rw-rw-r-- user user  0 B  Fri Jun 19 21:09:02 2026 ‘folder’$‘003’

$ find . -inum 5120013 -delete

Nobody's getting into the real issue lol. Yes, yes, tab completion. But all you need to do is escape the dollar sign: \$. Or include it inside the single quotes.

👍👍