If you download files from the Web, they may have been created under Windows, with names inconsistent with Unix. 

Here are a couple of tips for handling this:

The most common problem is file names with embedded spaces, say a file named before July. To reference such a file from a C shell command line, simply precede each space by a backslash. For instance, to remove the file before July, type 

rm  before\  July

Suppose you have a file whose name begins with the character ‘-’. The problem here is that most Unix commands use that character to signify options to the commands. 

For example:

ls  -ul

is the command to list the files and their latest access times.

Say you have a file named -trendy, which you want to copy to xyz. You could not simply type

cp  -trendy  xyz

but could type

cp  --  -trendy  xyz

The double hyphen tells the shell that there will be no more options on this line.

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