Removing a file that starts with a dash in Linux

Igor Kromin | Consultant. Coder. Blogger. Tinkerer. Gamer.

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Removing a file that starts with a dash in Linux

11-Dec-2019

While looking around one of the servers at work I noticed that the application account I was logged into had an odd file in its home directory. The file was named "-rw-r-----.". This was obviously something that went wrong and I decided to remove it. However when doing the naive thing and simply running the following command results in an error...

Command

$ rm "-rw-r-----."

rm: invalid option -- 'w'

Try `rm ./-rw-r-----.' to remove the file `-rw-r-----.'.

Try `rm --help' for more information.

The issue arises because the file name starts with a dash character. The correct (and error free) way to remove such files is to use the -- command line argument with rm first like so...

Command

$ rm -- -rw-r-----.

No errors!

-i

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