Re: Could rm remove files and folders with colon in their name?

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

On Nov 10 21:24, Mario Emmenlauer wrote:
> On 10.11.21 14:49, Corinna Vinschen via Cygwin wrote:
> > On Nov 10 10:45, Mario Emmenlauer wrote:
> >> Could 'rm' support removing files and folders that have a colon ':' in
> >> their name? I.e. I would like that 'rm -fr' would remove a full directory
> >> tree, including such folders. Currently it will correctly remove anything
> >> inside such folders, but not the folder itself.
> >>
> >> As an example, for the following structure:
> >>     C:/root/folder/C:/inside/file.txt
> >>
> >> When using 'rm -fr root', afterwards I have:
> >>     C:/root/folder/C:
> > 
> > It works fine if the folder is called, say, "a:b", it just doesn't
> > work for a name which looks like a drive letter "x:", apparently.
> 
> That is indeed interesting, I was not aware of it! Then maybe the
> problem is not so hard to solve? That would be awesome!

To the contrary.  The problem is the ambiguity that "X:/foo" might
be either the absolute POSIX path $CWD/X:/foo, or the absolute DOS
path "X:\foo".  I have a patch which fixes your case, but not much
else.  The problem is that we historically allow DOS paths as input
at all.  That was a bad decision from the start, but you can't easily
change 25 years of history...


Corinna