Today I’ve been doing some system cleaning and, for some reason completely not unbeknownst to me (and I’ll never tell you why), I found a file called “-o” on my system. I determined to remove this malignantly named interloper.
I drew my trusty rm command and struck:
rm -o
rm: ERROR: Illegal option – o
rm “-o”
rm: ERROR: Illegal option -- o
rm \-o
rm: ERROR: Illegal option -- o
mv -o prepare_to_be_deleted
mv: ERROR: Illegal option -- o
I opened up ftp and waited; waited for the file to stop watching me, to let its guard down. (This takes approximately 0.32 ms under SCO Unix.) I opened up an ftp connection…to my own system! Quickly, I typed and ended the line with a emphatic pinky on the Enter key.
del -o
DELE command successful” echoed throughout the system. I had freed them from their “-o”ppressor. All thanks to the help of ftp: File Termination Protocol.
Not certain this will work in SCO Unix, but in most Unices I’ve worked with, a ‘--’ indicates to the program that everything to the right should be taken as a filename and not an option. So “rm—-o” would have worked. Also, you could have created a dummy file with a normal filename (say ‘foo’
, then deleted the dummy file and your -o file with “rm foo -o”
There are two obvious solutions for this kind of problem:
1. Unix wizard: rm ./-o
2. Mere mortal: start up Midnight Commander, Nautilus or some other graphical pointy-clicky file manager, select the file, delete it.
’scosh’ would qualify under solution #2. What a wretched piece of interface but handy for deleting things more difficult to grab with the command line.
Of course, no one else has pointed out that ‘rm *’ would definitely take care of the offending file with ease.
I use Exceed with all of its connections, either in ftp or telnet or whatever. The ftp works well.
I think I have done something similar using rm with -i to give the interactive prompt option.
http://king-of-fools.com/blog/trackback/1346/ZGSQ5FWI/