Davide Brini wrote: ... > At least in bash, but I suppose in other shells too, > > rm -rf #* > > treats the "#*" part as a comment, and (if you remove the "-f") complains > about missing operand to rm.
That is the default, but for an interactive shell, that behavior can be changed: $ echo a b # c a b $ shopt -u interactive_comments $ echo a b # c a b # c