From: Paul Mc Auley (pmcauley at domain baltimore.com)
Date: Tue 11 Jul 2000 - 09:51:18 IST
On Tue, 11 Jul 2000 09:38:29 +0100
"Guest, Ken" <kengu at domain credo.ie> wrote:
| I don't know how I managed it, but I have a rather large
| file on styx named "--exclude".
| Any attempt to rm it or mv it to a deletable file name
| results in the program stating something along the lines of
| 'option not supported'.
| I've tried quoting the filename, using multichar wildcards (*)
| and singlechar wildcards (?) to no avail.
| Does anybody have suggestions on how I can delete this file?
[Googles for the FAQ]
1) How do I remove a file whose name begins with a "-" ?
Figure out some way to name the file so that it doesn't
begin with a dash. The simplest answer is to use
rm ./-filename
(assuming "-filename" is in the current directory, of course.)
This method of avoiding the interpretation of the "-" works
with other commands too.
Many commands, particularly those that have been written to use
the "getopt(3)" argument parsing routine, accept a "--" argument
which means "this is the last option, anything after this is not
an option", so your version of rm might handle "rm -- -filename".
Some versions of rm that don't use getopt() treat a single "-"
in the same way, so you can also try "rm - -filename".
Paul
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