Cygwin Question
 

Hi Folks,

First post - if I'm reading the forum notes correctly I have to post here to be able to post elsewhere ?

Regards,
Scott

The idea is to post a bit of an introduction of yourself and also to verify you're not just joining to post spam.

Hi Folks,

Ok - I'm a 20+ year IT veteran currently contracted by a large national telco... I've done a bit of everything over the years - starting out with PC based Unix with Token Ring networks - back when we had to load the OS with around 40 individual floppy disks... Over the years I've been a Solaris, AIX, and HPuX admin... I've been an Informix DBA and developer... I've dabbled in some light programming efforts... For the last 10 years or so I've been focused on the network side managing large mission critical networks for State Lottery and the NYSE...

I just have a very simple shell script question to which the answer seems to allude me - LOL - probably just getting old... I have a bunch of files that all start with the "-" character ( -moo, -moo1, -moo2 )... I just need to rename them as Unix treats the "-" as a switch... What's the syntax to move these files while canceling out the special meaning of the "-" ?

Thanks...

Regards,
Scott

Oh - forgot this - on a Solaris box - this works:

mv -f - '-moo' /tmp/SCO-moo

However - it doesn't work on a Cygwin box...

Regards,
Scott

mv .//-moo /tmp/SCO-moo

I figured that out because when I tried to create my test file on Cygwin it complained:
$ touch ./"\-moo"
cygwin warning:
MS-DOS style path detected: ./\-moo
Preferred POSIX equivalent is: .//-moo
CYGWIN environment variable option "nodosfilewarning" turns off this warning.
Consult the user's guide for more details about POSIX paths:
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/usin...sing-pathnames
touch: cannot touch `./\\-moo': No such file or directory

Thanks for the help Mensa !!!

Yeah - while beating my head against the wall I came up with another way around it - I just included the absolute PATH which moved the placement of the "-" to a place where it could cause no harm... Thanks for the references - I'll take a look at them as well - LOL - you never know when you need to pull something out of your bag of tricks... Much appreciated...

Regards,
Scott

Glad you fixed it. At top of thread should be a link to "Mark this thread as resolved". If you do that others with same issue in future may find the fix more quickly.