In the Unix Hater's Handbook posted a few weeks ago on this list they say
that rm really hates file names beginning with -. It tends to treat them as
run flags.

They suggest one of the following syntaxes to remove them:

rm - -file

or

rm ./-file

The first syntax is apparently and undocumented feature of rm where a lone
hyphen tells rm to treat all future hyphens as part of the file name. The
second suggestion seems less kludgy.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul H. Christidis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 2:12 PM
Subject: [HP3000-L] OT: Wildcard characters in UNIX file names


> Folks,
>
> In an attempt to display the 'usage' instructions of a utility in UNIX, I
> invoked it using the '-?' switch.  The utility proceeded to run and in the
> process created three files having the '-?' prefix.  I've tried different
> incantations of the 'rm' command without any luck.  Does anyone have any
> ideas?
>
> Regards
> Paul Christidis
>
> # uname -a
> SunOS lbcns01 5.4 Generic_101945-64 sun4m sparc
> # ls -lsa
> total 848
>    2 -rw-r--r--   1 root     other         55 Apr 28 10:37 -?.cmd
>    2 -rw-r--r--   1 root     other         87 Apr 28 10:37 -?.log
>    0 -rw-r--r--   1 root     other          0 Apr 28 10:37 -?.txt
>
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