How to open a "-" dashed filename using terminal?

Question

I tried gedit, nano, vi, leafpad and other text editors , it won't open, I tried cat and other file looking commands, and I ensure you it's a file not a directory!

Answer 1

This type of approach has a lot of misunderstanding because using - as an argument refers to STDIN/STDOUT i.e dev/stdin or dev/stdout .So if you want to open this type of file you have to specify the full location of the file such as ./- .For eg. , if you want to see what is in that file use cat ./-

Answer 2

Both cat < - and ./- command will give you the output

Answer 3

you can use redirection

cat < -file_name

Answer 4

It looks like the rev command doesn't treat - as a special character.

From the man page

The rev utility copies the specified files to standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line.

so rev - | rev

should show what's in the file in the correct order.

Answer 5

I tried with pico or vi command.pico readme which allowed me open in editor and read the contents.

Answer 6

if you want to open this type of file you have to specify the full location of the file such as ./- .For eg. , if you want to see what is in that file use cat ./-