It probably got dropped when more orthogonal ways to do the same thing were better supported. Before looking for a builtin command to do that, I'd execute a fi

It probably got dropped when more orthogonal ways to do the same thing were better supported. Before looking for a builtin command to do that, I'd execute a find(1) in my editor to load a buffer up with potential files to delete, and then xargs(1) the edited buffer to rm(1) them; without xargs I'd probably just prepend "rm -f" to all lines and then execute the whole buffer; if I wished to do it the slow way I could pipe those names through a shell loop; etc. etc. (with ed(1) you'd need to first write the buffer to the filesystem, then bang-execute it, but the same workflow would suffice even on a hard tty) EDIT: see sibling for real story: dsw(1) was meant to remove files with shell-inexpressible filenames, so none of the above would apply. Not being a unix-kernel hacker (and not having had my shell sessions corrupted by noise chars due to someone attempting to use the modem line for voice in decades), I've always managed to use wildcards to get a suitably-unique typeable match to the occasional binary-named junk file.