Somehow, I got a file in my tree that started with a null byte. I only discovered it because git status was noting it wasn't added to my branch, and wanted to know if I wanted to add it.

No, no, I did not. I wanted to delete it.

But, of course, you cannot reference such a file by name, so I had to learn a few tricks.

First off, you can list names with binary bytes using:

/bin/ls -lb

But even better, you can get the inode if you use:

/bin/ls -li

When you do, the inode is in the first column of the list for each file.

Once you know that, you can delete the file, using find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -inum <inode_id> -exec rm -i -- {} +