an rm question

[William L. Moran Jr.]

I managed to create a file whose name contained bizarre characters; in
fact, they were so bizarre that rm * wouldn't remove them (oh well,
porting arc is a nasty business), I got a nonexistent file message.
Anyway, since the directory they were in was junk I went up one dir
and did an 'rm -r' on the directory, and that worked. So, being the
curious sort, I went to the BSD sources and took a look; however, I
can't figure out why the rm -r worked when the other didn't. I would
appreciate any explanation. BTW the original problem was on a Xenix
system, so I would probably accept a "Xenix is f***ed" explanation. :)


			  
			  William L. Moran Jr.
moran@{yale.arpa, cs.yale.edu, yalecs.bitnet}  ...{ihnp4!hsi,decvax}!yale!moran

A man who could reason like that could not reason at all.
				Lord Peter Wimsey