rm: illegal option -- / (was: Re: Please help.....)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 2, 2008, at 04:06, Christos Vlachos wrote:

> I would appreciate your help on the following problem. I want to  
> uninstall MacPorts, since I installed it before installing X11 and  
> Xcode. Now, the problem is that although I follow the command line  
> below, I get the error:
>
> rm: illegal option -- /
> usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
>        unlink file
>
> The problem is that I have not used any "--" in the terminal  
> command. The command line I used is the following (copy+pasted)  
> from the web page.
>
>
>
>  sudo rm -rf \
>     /opt/local \
>     /etc/manpaths.d/macports \
>     /etc/paths.d/macports \
>     /Applications/DarwinPorts \
>     /Applications/MacPorts \
>     /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
>     /Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
>     /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
>     /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
>     /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
>     /Library/Tcl/macports1.0
>
>
> I would really appreciate your help on this. Is there any possible  
> command line to solve the problem? Specifically, is there any  
> command line that uninstalls the MacPort successfully under these  
> circumstances?

Ah, sorry, I misread earlier: it's saying the illegal option is "/".  
Which also doesn't make sense to me.

What do you get if you type "which rm"?

What do you get if you type "alias | grep rm"?

Does the "rm" command work for you in other circumstances?

To remove MacPorts, you just need to remove all the items listed  
above. If your "rm" command is not working, you can delete them in  
the Finder instead.