I'd like to use Linux but...

If you've copied and pasted from somewhere my first thought (backed up by my complete inability to create a directory called -p even with single quotes, double quotes, escaping) is that the - is not in fact a normal dash character but some kind of fancy Unicode en-dash as copied and pasted from something e.g. written on a Mac or in Word.

I think this was it. I just ls'ed the parent dir, copied the offending dir, and a rmdir was able to get rid of it with no fuss. Thanks!

migrating thunderbird mail to a new distro... create a new profile, tell it to use the common drive rather than the distro-specific drive, only it's not obvious it wants a profile directory, not the directory that the profiles go in (like making my home directory /home rather than /home/koogy). so now if i delete the new profile it'll nuke ALL profiles. luckily i noticed and corrected it.

bit of a panic when the Mail directory looked completely empty, 10 years of emails gone, before i realised .thunderbird is hidden because of the leading dot.

but at least they've fixed the zoom now