How to delete “-” file from svn?

Question

Accidentally I have created file "-" (just a minus) in a directory and commited it. I have to delete it because its causing error on other machines: svn: Can't convert string from 'UTF-8' to native encoding: svn: ?\226?\128?\147

I can remove it from local directory using "rm -i *" or with python "os.remove('\xe2\x80\x93')" but those methods do not work with "svn rm".

How to delete such file from svn repository?

Answer 1

You could try svn rm ./-

It might not actually be a minus, tho', but a similar-looking character.

Answer 2

Usually, you need to terminate the list of command line options using a -- marker.

Try something like svn rm -- -.

Same if you want to remove the directory from the file system: rm -r -- -.

Answer 3

try svn rm -- -

-- means "stop reading options".

Answer 4

In some cases (at the console, for example) you might not be able to copy/paste an odd character. In that situation, you can use file globbing. It's a good idea to do ls before the rm to make sure you're not including something in the deletion that you want to keep.

Any single-character filename:

ls -l ?
rm ?

or, any single-character filename that's not an alphanumeric character or a hyphen:

ls -l [^a-zA-Z0-9-]
rm [^a-zA-Z0-9-]

Another version (locale-aware) of that would be:

ls -l [^[:alnum:]-]
rm [^[:alnum:]-]

You can combine other lists of characters and classes in addition to more globbing and specific characters.

Delete any file with a three-character name that doesn't start with "m", "s" or "y", has any second character, and ends with "1" or "9":

rm [^msy]?[19]