rm the un-rm-able file
Ben Yau
byau at cardcommerce.com
Thu Sep 23 11:41:19 UTC 2004
> On 14:28 22 Sep 2004, James H. Cutts III <jcutts at coin.org> wrote:
> | Through creative fiddling with my RH 9.0 system, I have managed to
> | create a file with the name '--exclude=*.work.*' (ticks not included).
> | I want to delete this file. Any suggestions on the command or on the
> | Google search? I've tried including the file name in ' (ticks) and "
> | (quotes). Neither resulted in success.
>
> Naturally quotes won't do anything - "rm" never sees them - they exist purely
> to tell the shell how to interpret strings.
>
> Consider your problem: the filename resembles an option. So use a different
> filename, like "./--exclude=*.work.*", which doesn't start with a dash:
>
> rm ./--exclude*
>
> should be perfectly reliable.
>
If you are careful, you can use wildcard expressions with "rm -i" such as:
rm -i *exclude*
works too. Or any wildcard matching. The "-i" is interactive and it will go through every file that matches and then ask if you want to remove it or not. Eventually it will hit the --exclude=*.work* and then after you're done you can ctrl-c out of the "rm" command
Ben
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