"Kevin B. McCarty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Wed, 08 Sep 2004 08:31:39 -0400) writes:
> 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. One solution here is to just prefix the file name with a directory name. For example: $ rm ./-xfff works without a problem. > > 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department > WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University > GPG public key ID: 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544 -- "Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter." - Joseph Addison -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
