Re: rm difficult filename
John Summerfield wrote:
> Often, too, you can use the TAB key to advance over problematic characters, a "?" to represent one of them and "*" to represent any number of them. So
>
> rm ?rtsp-stream-over-tcp
> rm *over-tcp
Sometimes, but in this case it wouldn't work. Using a * or ? will help
with characters that the shell wants to mess with, but - generally has
no special meaning to the shell. [1]
So "rm *over-tcp" will be globbed by the shell and passed to rm as
"rm -rtsp-stream-over-tcp". This doesn't help because the first - is
interpreted by rm itself as an indication that the argument is a flag
instead of a file.
Some people take advantage of this behavior by creating a file called
"-i" in important directories, so "rm *" will turn into "rm -i ..."
causing rm to ask for confirmation before deleting.
[1] Yes, I'm aware of "cd -" and there are probably other special cases.
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG public key ID: 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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