How to open a "-" dashed filename using terminal?

I tried gedit, nano, vi, leafpad and other text editors , it won't open, I tried cat and other file looking commands, and I ensure you it's a file not a directory!

7 Answers

This type of approach has a lot of misunderstanding because using - as an argument refers to STDIN/STDOUT i.e dev/stdin or dev/stdout .So if you want to open this type of file you have to specify the full location of the file such as ./- .For eg. , if you want to see what is in that file use cat ./-

Both cat < - and ./- command will give you the output

you can use redirection

cat < -file_name

It looks like the rev command doesn't treat - as a special character.

From the man page

The rev utility copies the specified files to standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line. 

so rev - | rev

should show what's in the file in the correct order.

I tried with pico or vi command.pico readme which allowed me open in editor and read the contents.

if you want to open this type of file you have to specify the full location of the file such as ./- .For eg. , if you want to see what is in that file use cat ./-

cat ./- is the syntax that reveals the correct password for bandit the "rev -" reveals something else