Neat Challange with Wildcards

[Trogdor]

Here are the steps to the challange:

1) su to root
2) cd to /
3) open up vi, type "foo", and save the file as '*'
4) remove * without removing your entire filesystem!

Have fun!

[bwkaz]

I can't get vim to do that. It keeps saying "E77: Too many filenames". But I can save the file to \*, so I did that instead. ls showed it as having the name * when I was done.

Then:

rm \*

removed the file nicely.

Besides, rm won't recurse into subdirectories anyway. So you could rm * anyway, unless you have real files in /, which is not a great idea...

[0x12d3]

Originally posted by bwkaz
I can't get vim to do that. It keeps saying "E77: Too many filenames". But I can save the file to \*, so I did that instead. ls showed it as having the name * when I was done.

Then:

rm \*

removed the file nicely.

Besides, rm won't recurse into subdirectories anyway. So you could rm * anyway, unless you have real files in /, which is not a great idea...

Umm.. yeah. Me too
: )

[l01yuk]

In vim

:w \*

[Satanic Atheist]

1) Use the escape character "\" to delete it.
2) Use Midnight Commander to get rid of it.
3) Use Konqueror to scrap it.

James

[bwkaz]

Or, now that I think about it more,:

4) surround the * with single quotes to get rid of only the file

(single quotes prevent bash from doing pathname expansion.)