On Tue, 18 Nov 1997 08:52:41 -0600 (CST),
"David A. Gatwood" <marsmail@globegate.utm.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, David Brownlee wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, David A. Gatwood wrote:
> > >
> > > Yeah.  In fact, rm \"-axl\" should work, too (quotes to indicate that it's
> > > not a flag, backslashes to keep the shell from removing the quotes when
> > > turning it into an argument.  That might be shell-dependent, tho.
> > > Alternatively, ls *axl and if it's the only one, rm *axl.
> > > 
> > 	Neither option will work - the first will try to remove a file
> > 	with a " as the first and last character, the latter is identical
> > 	to typing 'rm -axl', which is what started this thread.
> 
> Dunno.  The first one worked fine under linux... and upon trying it again,

That can't be the case.  If it's really the case, Linux rm must be
nearly completely broken.

> it doesn't work....  I don't have a clue what's different....  Oh well....

rm \"-axl\" results in argv[] = { "rm", "\"-axl\"", NULL } upon
invocation.  So rm will try to unlink a file named "-axl" (including
the double quotes), not plain -axl.  Rm doesn't interpret quotes, you
know?

OTOH, rm *axl results in argv[] = { "rm", "-axl", NULL } (provided
that there's only -axl that matches the wild card), leading it to try
to interpret -axl as option switches.  You'll end up with the same
result as rm -axl with this one.

Ken