[Bendug] file name oddities

[Tim Howe]

I ran into an issue today that was a bit odd.  I downloaded a file that began with a dash (-) character.  Several standard programs choked on it because it was being misinterpreted as a command line flag.  I tried enclosing it in single and double quotes.  I tried escaping the first dash.  Nothing was working.  I couldn't even rename it because mv was hainv the same issue.  Finally I got tired of dealing with it, connected to my local ftp server and renamed it through FTP!

I'm wondering if anybody has seen stuff like this.  Sometimes parens and brackets have odd effects too, but they are generally easy to get around.

I'm using OpenBSD, so I'm not sure if the Linux equivalent programs have the same issues...

I'm thinking of updating my file name normalizing script (I use it for files in web directories) to get rid of crap like this.  Did I miss some obvious solution?  For some reason I think I did.

--TimH