Delete Troublesome Files

Before leaving rm, you should know a couple of things about its relationship to certain files on your system. First, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to remove the . or .. directories because they are required to keep your file system hierarchy in place. Besides, why would you want to remove them? Leave'em alone!

How do you remove a file with a space in it? The normal way of invoking rmthe command, followed by the filenamewon't work because rm thinks you're talking about two different files. Actually, removing Cousin Harold's picture isn't too hard. Just put the name of the file in quotation marks.

$ ls cousin harold.jpg -cousin_roy.jpg cousin_beth.jpg $ rm cousin harold.jpg rm: cannot remove 'cousin': No such file or  directory rm: cannot remove 'harold.jpg': No such file or  directory $ rm "cousin harold.jpg" $ ls -cousin_roy.jpg cousin_beth.jpg 

Here's more of a head-scratcher: How do you remove a file whose name starts with -?

$ ls -cousin_roy.jpg cousin_beth.jpg $ rm -cousin_roy.jpg rm: invalid option -- c Try 'rm --help' for more information. 

D'oh! The rm command sees the - and thinks it's the start of an option, but it doesn't recognize an option that starts with c. It continues with ousin_roy.jpg and doesn't know what to do.

You have two solutions. You can preface the problematic filename with --, which indicates to the command that anything coming afterward should not be taken as an option, and is instead a file or folder.

$ ls -cousin_roy.jpg cousin_beth.jpg $ rm -- -cousin_roy.jpg $ ls cousin_beth.jpg 

Otherwise, you can use the . as part of your pathname, thus bypassing the space before the - that confuses the rm command and leads it into thinking the filename is actually an option.

$ ls -cousin_roy.jpg cousin_beth.jpg $ rm ./-cousin_roy.jpg $ ls cousin_beth.jpg 

It just goes to show that the ingenuity of Linux users runs deep. That, and try not to put a hyphen at the beginning of your filename!