I inadvertently created a file called -r in my home directory. Now I cannot get rid of it:
rm -rf
rm: missing operand
Try 'rm --help' for more information.
Other attempts:
rm /-/r
rm: cannot remove ‘/-/r’: No such file or directory
Another one:
rm \-r
rm: missing operand
Try 'rm --help' for more information.
Is there a way to remove this file without deleting the whole directory?
There are many ways of doing this:
Use -- which signifies the end of option flags and the beginning of the list of arguments for many programs (including rm).
rm -- -r
Use the full path
rm /home/you/directory/-r
or, from the same directory (your current directory is referred to as .):
rm ./-r
Use find
find . -name "-r" -exec rm {} \;
or, to get all such files
find . -name "-*" -exec rm {} \;
Use an ugly hack. Move everything to a different directory (this will fail for the -r file for the same reason as rm does) and then delete the original directory (which will remove the file) and move everything back again. So, assuming your -r file is in ~/foo:
$ mkdir ~/bar
$ for f in *; do mv "$f" ../bar/; done
mv: invalid option -- 'r'
Try 'mv --help' for more information.
$ rm -rf ~/foo
$ mkdir ~/foo && cd ~/foo
$ mv ~/bar/* .
$ rmdir ~/bar
In this case you have to use the double-dash (--) in your command arguments.
The purpose of it is to tell to the command that what's follow has not to be taken as an argument to the command but a simple input. In the case of rm, a file or directory name.
So type rm -- -r and you should get rid of this file.
You can also delete such files (starting with a '-') with this command:
rm ./-r
See the rm man page:
To remove a file whose name starts with a '-', for example '-foo', use one of these commands:
rm -- -foo rm ./-foo
Or you could specify the full path of the directory in the rm command,
Example:
rm -rf ~/Desktop/-r
