Category: Utilities

So you have a file that starts with a dash/hyphen/- and need to delete it. But when you try to do so, the "rm" command complains that you have passed an "invalid option –". This post looks at the simple solution to deleting a file that starts with a dash/hyphen.

As an example, doing a directory listing gives you something like this:

$ ls -l
total 678586
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root        54 Apr 29 15:39 -.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     26819 Apr 30 13:17 210.5.53.35.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     18114 Apr 30 01:37 210.5.53.36.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     18410 Apr 30 01:37 210.5.53.37.log

You try to delete the -.log file like this:

rm -.log

and rm complains like this:

rm: invalid option -- .
Try rm ./-.log' to remove the file -.log'.
Try `rm --help' for more information.

The answer is actually supplied in the error message, which is fairly unusual for a Linux/Unix command. Instead of doing rm -.log you simply add ./ to the start and run this instead:

rm ./-.log

This will also work for other command line utilities you need to run against a file starting with a hypen/dash.