Question

Which of the following command will remove the file named * ?

(a) rm *

(b) rm ‘*’

(c) rm \*

(d) rm ‘*’ and rm \*

I got this question at a job interview.

This interesting question is from Pattern Matching, Escaping and Quoting in division The Shell of Unix

Answer 1

Right choice is (d) rm ‘*’ and rm \*

The explanation: To suppress the nature of wildcard * we can use either escaping or quoting. The \ symbol will suppress the feature of wildcard and will remove the file named *. Similarly using quoting we can turn off the meaning of the meta character.