OK, so I screwed up big time, and typed the following
$ mkdir ls -al

SO now I have two directories "ls" and "-al".  I removed "ls", but don't
know how to remove "-al".  All commands fail:

$ rm -f '-al'
rm: illegal option -- a
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
       unlink file
$ rm -f "-al"
rm: illegal option -- a
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
       unlink file
$ rm -f \-al
rm: illegal option -- a
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
       unlink file

I tried similarly with rmdir also.  I suppose I could use something like
mc or some X filemanager, but I want to try and remove it using CL utils.

Could somebody help/advise,
__
Rakhesh Sasidharan	rakhesh at cse.iitd.ac.in