如何删除 ~ 而不删除我的主目录？

Question

By mistake while using vim when exiting using :wq! I type an extra character ( ~ ) this created a directory named ~ ; however if I cd into it it would take me to the current user's home . How can I remove this directory without actually remove my home directory?

Answer 1

Just quote the ~ . Use rmdir , not rm , to be safe ( rmdir will only remove an empty directory, so won't get rid of your home directory even if you mess it up).

$ mkdir '~'
$ ls -la '~'
total 16
drwxr-xr-x  2 me users  4096 Apr 20 13:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 97 me users 12288 Apr 20 13:20 ..
$ rmdir '~'
$ ls -la '~'
ls: cannot access ~: No such file or directory
$ 

Answer 2

It can be solved using rm -rfi ./\\~ , which explicitly specifies the current directory.

(*) Similar question already ask here (thanks @AvihooMamka)

Answer 3

All of the recommended ways didn't help in my case. So I did:

rm -rf ./'~'

and it helped to get rid of "~" directory in my user dir.