I'd like to use Linux but...

Had to look up that TempleOS

"... If I want to code an OS that uses interpretive dance as the input method, I should be allowed to do so..."

(I should add that's not what TempleOS is about, just a funny quote from the wiki)

I needed something to do to distract me from relentless misery, so perhaps unwisely I decided to wipe my ancient windows 7 laptop and stick Mint on it. It actually worked first time! And it's a lot faster and the fan is quieter. Sorry to besmirch you Mint. Guessing perhaps VMWare or Virtual Box or whatever it was I used before was the problem.

Hope your installation lasts longer than the new govt.
Had to move off it after a month and a half myself. BUt could be this computer and not being able to get photos off a digital camera, or direct files to restore on a disc too.So your experience may well be different.

I pasted a

mkdir -p WHATEVER

-p

rmdir -- -p
rmdir ./-p
rmdir -- ./-p
rm -rf -- -p
rm -rf -- ./-p

The rmdir commands all result in

rmdir: failed to remove './-p': No such file or directory

-p

rm -rf

try rm -rfi * which will delete everything but prompt you first. so reply no for the things you want to keep and yes for that one directory.

** test it on a /tmp directory first, I'm not sure how rf and i will interact **

also i find using command line completion is sometimes handy so rmdir and hit tab and it'll list the directories *including any escape characters it needs to deal with the special characters*. useful if the filenames include spaces or brackets etc

just want to say oof and <3, i hate this shit

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.

If you copy the directory name directly from the output of ls, then
ls -d <paste directory name>
(you may need to add quote marks but it worked for me without) does it return just that one directory? Can you then rmdir it by pasting?

(the -d tells it to show you the details for the directory and not the files in it)

(Or you can check the weird character theory by piping the output of ls into the hex byte viewer tool hexdump, e.g. if you run this ls command:
ls -d ?p/ | hexdump -C

NB If it says "No such file or directory" try "ls -d *p | hexdump -C" but that will also pick up any other directory names ending in p - the ? should only match one character, but if it's a really weird character or your encoding settings are wrong ? may not work.

To test I've created a filename which is –p where the – is an en-dash character I copied off a webpage and the results I see are:

00000000 e2 80 93 70 2f 0a |...p/.|

The 70 is the p character, 2f is / and 0a is the final newline, so the mysterious character is E2 80 93 in utf-8 (Ubuntu's default encoding). Whereas if the character is actually a regular - character you should see:

00000000 2d 70 2f 0a |-p/.|

You don't necessarily have the same E2 80 93 dash character but if the hexdump output is longer than the bottom version then it's some kind of non-ascii character.)

I'm lazy and always deleted/renamed those with mc or if it's not installed then whatever GUI file manager is available.

ls -li to get the inode number of the directory
find . -type d -inum ### -exec rm '{}' \;
where you replace ### in the second command with the einode number that was in the output of the first command

That works anytime you have a file or directory with weird characters in the name

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