Bash Filenames – How to Delete a File Named ‘>’

bashfilenamesquotingrm

I was running a Python script that malfunctioned and used sudo to create a file named >.

How can I get rid of this file?

Of course, when I try sudo rm >, I get the error bash: syntax error near unexpected token 'newline', because it thinks I'm trying to redirect the output of rm.

Its permissions are -rw-r--r--.

Best Answer

Any of these should work:

sudo rm \>
sudo rm '>'
sudo rm ">"
sudo find . -name '>' -delete
sudo find . -name '>' -exec rm {} +

Note that the last two commands, those using find, will find all files or directories named > in the current folder and all its subfolders. To avoid that, use GNU find:

sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -name '>' -delete
sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -name '>' -exec rm {} +

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An alias is expanded simply by replacing the alias by its definition (as a list of tokens, not a string, which is basically equivalent to taking the string and adding a space at the end). So stopdev; true is expanded to

cd $HOME/website; make website_stop; make backend_stop; ; true
                                                      ^^^

Since you can't have two consecutive semicolons in the shell syntax, that's a syntax error.

You can remove the ;, and that will make stopdev; startev work, but it isn't good, because any argument you pass to stopdev will be passed to make backend_stop, which is probably not desirable.

You should make this a function. Also, don't run the make commands if the cd command fails.

stopdev () {
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    make backend_stop
  }
}

An improvement would be to make the function return a failure code even if make website_stop fails but make backend_stop succeeds.

stopdev () {
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    ret=$?
    make backend_stop && return $ret
  }
}

Note that this leaves you in the ~/website directory. To avoid changing the directory of the shell process, run the function in a subshell.

stopdev () (
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    ret=$?
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  }
)

Alternatively, with GNU make, you can use its -C option.

stopdev () {
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  ret=$?
  make -C "$HOME/website" backend_stop && return $ret
}

If the targets never fail, just pass them both.

stopdev () (
  cd "$HOME/website" && make website_stop backend_stop
)

stopdev () {
  make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop backend_stop
}

Best Answer

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