Using terminal what is the command I should apply to delete a file?

rm file_name

or rm -r (if you want to delete a directory)

thank you friend a lot. may you tell me please what rm stands for?

to remove a complete dir we use rmdir but you told that rm -r. is rm - r is equivalent to deltree in windows?

rm -r is a recursive removal of the directory. It is roughly equivalent to rmdir. "rm" doesn't technically stand for anything, but many linux commands are a shortened form of their action: "remove"

Erase <filename>

try typing help at CLI (command line interface)

Erm, erase? That's normally DOS only. Although it's possible you've got some sort of unusual setup where it will work.

And just a quick point here on the difference between rm -r and rmdir.
rm -r will delete a directory and all contents. rmdir will only delete empty directories.

yes trevelluk........i just interested to know the clear difference between rmdir and rm -r. thank you very much friend.
you may also have observed that i referred deltree from windows.
get your point clearly. you mean to say rm -r is exactly similar to deltree (in windows). and rmdir is similar to rmdir or rd (in windows/dos). am i correct?
now the million doller question is that.......do i have to confirm with "y/n" option if i use rm -r (as we have to in dos) or it directly remove all the contents with the directory without any warning?

OK, I'm not really that familiar with DOS commands. It's been a long time since I've been near the things

Regarding confirmation: rm -r will delete most files without any need for confirmation. If one of the files isn't writeable, you will be prompted. To automatically delete this as well without prompting, use rm -rf

For more info, type man rm (man <command>) will display the electronic manual page for that command. This is your friend

Well, rm could ask confirmation or not, it depends on the distribution, I think. Tested several of them, in some cases the user profiles are created with an alias to rm, so it asks for confirmation every time, while in others it doesn't.

Personally, I create the alias in such a way that rm asks me. If i don't want to be bothered, just run "\rm ...".

About the differences with rmdir, I think this does not removes the directory unless it is empty. I don't know if there is a parameter like -f for rm to force the action.

Thank you friends for your suggestions. I have learnt a lot from your discussions. I am a newbie and that is why my questions are like newbies. If I get into another problem I shall be asking all your help in the forum. Thank you again.