Delete a folder named ~ in unix

Question

Under my home directory I see a directory named ~. I guess I must have accidentally copied my home directory somehow.

Anyway, it's eaten up all my space and I'd like to remove it but obviously just running rm -r ~ will delete the entire contents of my home directory.

Any idea how to delete that ~ directory without any damage?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:11

2

Just add a \ before it: rm -rf \~.

answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:11

NRitH

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:10

1

Escape it so the shell doesn't expand the tilde. Any of these will do:

rm -r '~'
rm -r \~
rm -r ~/'~'
rm -r ~/\~

answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:10

John Kugelman

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:14

1

I would use rm -rf \~ The \ escape key should stop you from deleting you're home directory.

answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:14

Am Elemara

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 19 '18 at 15:17

You can try to make an ls | grep -v <other files> statement, which ignores all the other files, so that it only lists the file with that weird name.
Then you do:

rm $(ls | grep -v <other files>)

Obviously, you need to be careful first to test this thoroughly.

Delete a folder named ~ in unix

4 Answers4