How to rm a file called "-I"

[Craig A. Sharp]

I know, its a strange question. But how do I do it. rm is seeing the name as a switch.

Thanks,

Craig

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Getopts has the convention that "--" means no more arguments follow; so:

rm -- -l

[John Dvorchak]

Age old problem. Or if the file name is unprintable characters. The recomended way is to ls -i which will give you the inode number of the file then do a find and -exec rm -i :

root> ls -i

12345 -lfile

root> find . -inum 12345 -exec rm -i {} \;

Then it will prompt you to remove the file.

[Jeff_Traigle]

Or "rm ./-l"

There is an example of this very problem in the rm man page.

[Sandman!]

cd to the folder containing the file and do a...

# rm -i

...then answer "y" only when it prompts you for the file in question i.e. "-l"

cheers!

[Arturo Galbiati]

Hi,
rm -- "-i"

HTH,
Art

[Muthukumar_5]

simply as,

# rm ./-I

or

# rm -- -I

# rm /-I

--
Muthu

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi craig,

being more cautious, i would do a mv first then proceed with the delete.

mv -- -l l
rm l

kind regards
yogeeraj

[Geoff Wild]

Also see:

http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/topics/troubleshooting/os/unix/1231/

Rgds...Geoff