How to open a "-" dashed filename using terminal?

I tried gedit, nano, vi, leafpad and other text editors , it won't open, I tried cat and other file looking commands, and I ensure you it's a file not a directory!

Solution 1:

This type of approach has a lot of misunderstanding because using - as an argument refers to STDIN/STDOUT i.e dev/stdin or dev/stdout .So if you want to open this type of file you have to specify the full location of the file such as ./- .For eg. , if you want to see what is in that file use cat ./-

Solution 2:

Both cat < - and ./- command will give you the output

Solution 3:

you can use redirection

cat < -file_name