removing a file with hyphens

[Simon Burr]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 08:24:03AM +0100, Stig Brautaset wrote:
>On 12 Jun 2007, at 00:31, asmith9983 at gmail.com wrote:
>>"rm -rfv /"
>>One unfortunate side-effect  is that system no longer runs after  
>>removing the files, so this command is not the recommended  method.
>I wish people wouldn't make these suggestions. They are extremely  
>unhelpful and even less funny.

Especially if you've ever had to clean up from the end results of it
happening. That said, it can be an interesting exercise to think about how
you'd really blat the contents of a disk to make the prior contents less
readable - the usual method involves dd and /dev/random (if you have it;
/dev/zero otherwise). Note that best way to make sure the data on a disk is
no longer readable usually involves mechnically destroying the disk and then
heat treating it.

Still, there are some interesting war stories out there of how to recover
from an accidently rm -rf / as root; the best probably being:
  http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html

-- 
   Simon the stressed        http://www.bpfh.net/           simes at bpfh.net
                 Chocolate is *not* a substitute for sleep