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One time I was debugging the path resolver in a static site generator I was writing. I generated a site ~/foo, thinking it would do /home/shantaram/foo, but instead it made a dir '~' in the current directory. I did `rm -rf ~` without thinking. Command took super long, wondered what was going on, ctrl-c'd in horror... that was fun.


I’m really curious: without cheating by using the GUI, what would be the proper way to delete such an obnoxiously-named directory? Would “$PWD/~” work?


A few ways.

rm ./~ is likely the easiest.

Another option, shell dependent, would be to turn off shell globbing.

The `GNU` version of `find` has a `-maxdepth` option so

find . -iname '~' -maxdepth 1 -exec rm {} \;

would work, but I don't like relying on `GNU` extensions.


Or just: rm "~"




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