How to access or remove files with leading dash in filenames on Linux

Last updated on July 12, 2020 by Dan Nanni

Some Linux tools generate file with leading dash or hyphen (-) in filenames. Or your hand-written program can accidentally produce filenames starting with minus. If you attempt to remove, copy, rename, or otherwise access such files by using ls, rm, cp, mv or chmod, you will get the following errors.

[cmd]: invalid option --

That is because your Linux system interprets the leading minus in filename as part of command line option, and throws an invalid option or non-existent mode error.

In order to deal with a leading dash in filename under Linux shell, you can try one of the following two methods.

Method One

Since a leading minus in filename introduces ambiguity in recognizing the filename, you just need to eliminate such ambiguity by prepending a pathname to the filename. For example, if you have a file named -my.txt in current directory, you can access it as follows.

$ chmod 600 ./-my.txt
$ rm ./-my.txt

Method Two

The second method to deal with a leading hyphen character is to take advantage of a special argument -- which is interpreted by getopt() as the "end of option." Most standard Linux command line utilities use getopt() to process command line arguments. When getopt() encounters --, it stops option-scanning process. Therefore, just insert -- in front of the filename to make it explicit that the hyphenated filename is not part of command line arguments.

$ chmod -- 600 -my.txt
$ rm -- -my.txt

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