Hyphens in UNIX filenames

Today I discovered an interesting UNIX design flaw. UNIX deals badly with files starting with -. Let’s mess around!

Warning: do like me, create a new directory and cd into it.

$ mkdir tests && cd tests
$ touch -r
touch: usage: touch [-alm] [-t time_t] <file>

Okay, so I can’t create a file starting with a -, because touch thinks it’s an argument. There are several ways around to create this file:

$ touch ./-r

Here you give it a path, so that the first argument touch gets is not a -. The path here (./) is a relative path, it’s the directory I’m currently in.
That’s the best method, but there are others.

$ touch -- -r

Some touch implementations allow the user to write -- between the options and the filename. This method doesn’t work everywhere, not with BusyBox for example, that’s why I prefer the method above.

$ touch r
$ mv r -r

This also works.

Okay, whatever the reason to create that file is, I finally have it. Yay!
Create a directory, we’ll see after why.

$ mkdir tre
$ ls -l
----rwxr-x system   sdcard_rw        0 2014-08-03 15:22 -r
d---rwxr-x system   sdcard_rw          2014-08-03 15:22 tre

Everything’s there, that’s cool, but now I want to delete everything in the directory, except subdirectories.

$ rm *
$ ls -l
----rwxr-x system   sdcard_rw        0 2014-08-03 15:22 -r

Wait, what ? -r should have been deleted, not the directory tre!
In fact, when I run that command, the shell transforms * into the list of files in the directory, then gives it to the program. In that case, there’s one file: -r, but the program rm has no way of knowing that -r is a file, not an argument. And even if you have other files in your directory, filenames starting with - always are first in the list of arguments, that’s standard.

It’s the end of this article, let’s delete that file!

$ rm -r
$ ls
-r

Oh…
Yes, method for creating and deleting that kind of files are the same, obviously this doesn’t work. But now it shouldn’t be hard for you to delete it, right?