rm \- "-" ??

Does anyone know when really did coreutils get patched for this behavior ?

rrs@learner:~$ rm -foo
rm: invalid option – o
Try rm ./-foo' to remove the file -foo’.
Try `rm –help’ for more information.

This feature really wasn’t earlier and if you ever ended up with files starting with characters like “-”, it was not a straight task to remove it.

Earlier (when I wasn’t aware of this patch), the workaround was to write a small 1 liner and not use getopt at all. Something like:

rrs@learner:~$ cat rm.py
#!/usr/bin/env python

import os, sys

sys.stdout.write(“Removing file %s.\n” % (sys.argv[1]) )
os.unlink(sys.argv[1])

I’m really happy to see this bug fixed.