Re: some clean rules don't work when some file starts with '-'

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Vincent,

* Vincent Lefevre wrote on Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 01:26:21PM CET:
> mostlyclean-compile:
>         -rm -f *.$(OBJEXT)
> 
> This results in:

> rm -f *.o
> rm: invalid option -- .
> Try `rm ./-.o' to remove the file `-.o'.

Why would you do that, using non-portable file names?
The linker will not even work with -.o.

Are you going to argue next that 'make' should be "fixed"
because it cannot handle file names with spaces?

There are lots of characters you cannot use portably,
some due to file system limitations, e.g., on w32,
some due to Autoconf, Automake, Make, M4, or the shell.
You can look at automake/tests/instspc.test for a
collection.

> mostlyclean-compile:
>         -rm -f ./*.$(OBJEXT)

FWIW, this wouldn't work (touch ./-a.o ./-b.o).

Cheers,
Ralf