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rm —

One guy said his preferred method was to cd up and nuke the whole directory.

Wow.

The method I learned, and used when helping my coworker, was the `—` option to `rm`.

Nowadays `rm` seems to detect this and gives a help text:

    $ rm -testfile
    rm: invalid option — ‘t’
    Try ‘rm ./-testfile’ to remove the file ‘-testfile’.
    Try ‘rm —help’ for more information.

This option is included in this article

https://kb.iu.edu/d/abao

which is high up on the search result for “linux remove file starting with dash”.

Then there’s this “creative” solution:

There are some characters that you cannot remove using any of the above methods, such as forward slashes, interpreted by Unix as directory separators. To remove a file with such meta-characters, you may have to FTP into the account containing the file from a separate account and enter the command:
`mdel`
You will be asked if you really wish to delete each file in the directory. Be sure to answer n (for no) for each file except the file containing the difficult character that you wish to delete.

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✽ Sunday, 2019-03-10

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