Dealing with Odd Filenames on the Commandline
July 7th, 2009 by Shawn Powers in
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Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter
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Command lineish
On July 9th, 2009 JackAcid (not verified) says:
Coud just use good old mc...
How to remove files that start with a dash
On July 7th, 2009 Troy Roberts (not verified) says:
The simplest solution to removing a file beginning with a dash is to append ./ to the file name. So, to remove a file named "-" use: rm ./-
Removing filenames that start with a dash
On July 8th, 2009 Gumnos (not verified) says:
This does work, but bash's wild-card expansion doesn't do this, so you can get caught by
rm *
where one of the filenames happens to be "-rf".
-gumnos
Bane of filenames -- beginning with a dash
On July 7th, 2009 Gumnos (not verified) says:
The bane of my filename experiences are filenames that begin with a dash. They choke all sorts of command-line processing. Though many programs allow you to use a double-dash to separate command-line switches from filenames, not all programs support this convention. Little is as cruel as creating a file named "-rf /" and watching somebody try to remove that file...
Dashes suck...
On July 7th, 2009 Dan Fekete (not verified) says:
Although I haven't dealt with it for a while, how does one deal with starting dashes? Would anyone be so kind as to post a script to find and change them to, say, an underscore?
In my previous experience I would have to change the name in gnome. But on servers with no X, this is a bit difficult.
- files
On July 8th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
Dan I feel your pain. Does this provide relief: cd ..; rm subdir/-*; cd -
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