How to Delete a File Starting with a Hyphen

I've never met a Bourne-style shell that allowed - in a variable name. Only ASCII letters (of either case), _ and digits are supported, and the first character must not be a digit.

If you have a program that requires an environment variable that doesn't match the shell restrictions, launch it with the env program.

env 'strange-name=some value' myprogram

Note that some shells (e.g. modern dash, mksh, zsh) remove variables whose name they don't like from the environment. (Shellshock has caused people to be more cautious about environment variable names, so restrictions are likely to become tighter over time, not more permissive.) So if you need to pass a variable whose name contains special character to a program, pass it directly, without a shell in between (env 'strange-name=some value' sh -c'…; myprogram' may or may not work).

What you really need to do is to fix your script so it converts the windows paths to Unix paths. One relatively easy way to do that is to take path separators out of the equation: rather than providing full path names to copy, you recursively walk directories, creating target directories on the remote side and specifying only the filename rather than the full path. :)

But until you get to that point, you need to protect the backslashes from the shell. You can do that by quoting using single quotes (backslashes are interpreted for some characters inside double quotes). Note specifically that the wildcard is outside of the quotes so the shell treats it as a wildcard rather than a literal *: :)

rm -rv '.\'*

Or you can do that by escaping the backslash (which would also work in double quotes, but the double quotes aren't needed here):

rm -rv .\\*

I would suggest that, before you remove stuff using a wildcard, you always first run ls with the same arguments, then use the up arrow to recall the last command, where you can change the ls to an rm. That way you can see the list of files before it's removed, preventing a potentially big mistake. :) I'm also a big fan of using -v with rm in cases like this.

sauer@lightning:/tmp> ls -vr .\\*
.\innerfile\gitkeep  .\gitkeep

.\innerfile:
sauer@lightning:/tmp> rm -vr .\\*
removed '.\gitkeep'
removed directory '.\innerfile'
removed '.\innerfile\gitkeep'