I was working on a shell script and I accidentally created a file with the variable as its name. Now I have $file
in my ls
output, and cannot remove it. What can I do?
6 Answers
You can escape the $
with \
:
rm \$file
-
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4It wouldn't hurt to use the
-i
switch (interactive, so you are prompted before the final removal) in this case... Jun 2, 2011 at 3:40
You can also do
rm '$file'
Stuff in single quotes is taken as literal always,so globs and variables don't get expanded.
Basically, if you want to do things literal with these weird characters, you need to escape it. In a shell there are several ways to do that. The first one is to prepend a '\' to every character you want to escape. So you can do rm \$file
. Another way is to quote them with single quotes, for example, rm '$file'
or rm '$'file
. Some people also consider double quotes as a mean to "escape", but it only escapes white spaces. For example if you have a file named a file
, you can do
rm a\ file
or
rm 'a file'
or
rm "a file"
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1
"..."
doesn't only escape white space, it escapes all but backslash,$
,`
and"
itself (and possibly!
if history expansion is not enabled. Note that backslash doesn't escape the newline character, it removes it instead (serves as line continuation) Feb 19, 2020 at 20:30
If you ever accidentally create a file named -rf
, you can use rm -- -rf
to delete it.
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@Peter Grill: This is exactly why the
--
option was created; to remove files that would otherwise be taken as options. Alternatively, you could test it with a brand-new directory named '-rf':rm -- -rf
should give you an error about being a directory.– Kevin MJun 2, 2011 at 15:59 -
Any graphical file manager should be able to handle this through the context menu, because it doesn't try to interpret anything.
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1
Some ways to get rid of files with weird names are to use globbing (i.e., rm ?file
if the first character is something strange, but that would also nuke Xfile
, need to be careful not to match too much, check with echo
beforehand) and/or use the interactive flag: rm -i *file
will ask for all stuff called somethingfile
if you want to delete it.