Could rm remove files and folders with colon in their name?

[Brian Inglis]

On 2021-11-10 02:45, Mario Emmenlauer wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> I've searched if this topic has come up before but could not find it.
> 
> Could 'rm' support removing files and folders that have a colon ':' in
> their name? I.e. I would like that 'rm -fr' would remove a full directory
> tree, including such folders. Currently it will correctly remove anything
> inside such folders, but not the folder itself.
> 
> As an example, for the following structure:
>      C:/root/folder/C:/inside/file.txt
> 
> When using 'rm -fr root', afterwards I have:
>      C:/root/folder/C:
> 
> To remove everything, I can use 'find root -depth -exec rmdir \{\} \;'
> 
> I understand that files and folders with colon in their name are illegal
> on Windows and not supported very well. But a number of tools manage to
> create (and also remove) such files. I've found that even the native
> 'del' can support this when using the UNC name (see for example
> https://serverfault.com/a/96833). It would be great if Cygwin could
> also feature this support.

> PS: These folders are created when I use the Cygwin-based build system
> for ICU (see 
> https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/icu4c/build.html#how-to-build-and-install-on-windows-with-cygwin) 
> 
> For me this is in a combination with native Perl for Windows (ActivePerl,
> in my case), and using absolute build paths. After using ICU's build
> system, I can not remove the build tree anymore. It may be possible to
> solve this on the ICU side too. But their automake-and-Perl-based path
> mangling is not easily modified, and I've failed to isolate the root
> cause of the illegal paths.

Install the Cygwin cygport and libicu-devel source and binary packages 
and use only Cygwin exclusively with cygport to avoid problems.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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