From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Dec 1 13: 3: 9 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2E3BA37B400 for ; Fri, 1 Dec 2000 13:03:06 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 70538 invoked by uid 100); 1 Dec 2000 21:03:05 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14888.4617.148599.530943@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 15:03:05 -0600 (CST) To: Larry Rosenman , Daniel.Bye@uk.uu.net Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Pesky file In-Reply-To: <119603073@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ X-Message: You should get a better mailer. Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Larry Rosenman types: > * Daniel Bye [001201 05:21]: > > Hi all, > > > > Here's a question for a Friday morning... Somehow, I have ended up with a > > file named -help in my home directory. How can I get rid of it? It is 0 > > bytes, > > and if I try to rm, mv, unlink it etc, the shell interprets the file name as > > an > > argument to the program and spews forth errors. Backslash escaping it > > doesn't work, and neither does quoting it. > rm -- -help > > or rm -i ?help That won't work any more than "rm *help" would. The problem with both of them is that the shell expands the metacharacters, so that rm sees the "-" first, so thinks it's an argument. Just FWIW, if you happen to be on a system that doesn't recognize the "--" convention (or need to run a command that doesn't), you can always do "rm ./-help". Trivia question: what two bytes can you *not* put in a Unix filename? http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message