How to DELETE files
Project Athena supports a program called "delete" for removing unwanted files.
To delete a file or empty directory called "foo," you would just type:
delete foo
In order to delete a file whose name begins with a dash ("-"), you need to use
the dash option to "delete". For example, to delete a file named "-foo",
you'd type:
delete -- -foo
You may accidently create files with other weird symbols or spaces in them.
To remove these files you can often simply enclose the name in quotes, i.e.,
for a file named "foo bar" or "foo*bar" or 'foobar you could type
delete "foo bar"
or
delete "foo*bar"
or
delete "'foobar"
Another technique that would work is to use the wildcard character "*"
however you should be very careful when using it. Typing:
delete foo*
would remove the above examples, but it will also delete the files "foo" and
"foolish".
If you wish to simply rename these files you can use the command mv, eg:
mv "foo bar" foobar
To rename the file to "foobar"
The delete program does not actually remove files permanently. Instead, it
marks them for deletion, and a system cleanup program purges deleted files
that have been sitting around for more than three days. Therefore, if you
accidentally delete a file and then realize that you want it back, you can get
it back by using the program "undelete," like this:
undelete foo
The programs "expunge" and "purge" are used to actively remove deleted files
from your account permanently; the only reason you should have to use them is
if you are over your quota allowance or close to it, since files that have
been deleted but not yet permanently removed still count towards your quota.
The program "lsdel" allows you to list deleted files that have not yet been
permanently removed.
For more information, please see the man pages for delete, undelete, expunge,
purge and lsdel. For example, to see the man page for delete, type:
man delete
NOTE: The delete package is Athena-specific. The standard Unix utility for
removing files is called "rm," and it exists on Athena in addition to delete.
However, we recommend that you use delete rather than rm, since files that you
rm accidentally cannot be recovered.
last updated: 7/14/95
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