After adding alias rm='rm -i' to my ~/.bashrc file (because, when I removed a file, it wasn't asking for confirmation), file names are surrounded with  signs as in the example below:rm: cannot remove file1.txt: No such file or directoryList of aliases:alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'alias grep='grep --color=auto'alias l.='ls -d .* --color=auto'alias ll='ls -l --color=auto'alias ls='ls --color=auto'alias rm='rm -i'alias vi='vim'alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'Note: I am ssh'ing to my CentOS machine with PuTTY from my Windows machine, so this is definitely a character encoding issue. Using Ubuntu guest in my VM, everything is fine. Smart quotes are showing as they need to.
Why are file names surrounded with  sign?
shell;locale;character encoding;utilities
These s are UTF-8 quotes that your current terminal is unable to display properly, being configured in ISO-8859-1 or similar.You can have a proper display with setting a matching locale or the POSIX one:$ rm file.txtrm: cannot remove   file.txt : No such file or directory$ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 rm file.txtrm: cannot remove   file.txt : No such file or directory$ LC_ALL=C rm file.txtrm: cannot remove 'file.txt' : No such file or directory$ rm foo 2>&1 | od -c0000000   r   m   :       c   a   n   n   o   t       r   e   m   o   v0000020   e     342 200 230   f   o   o 342 200 231   :       N   o    0000040   s   u   c   h       f   i   l   e       o   r       d   i   r0000060   e   c   t   o   r   y  \n0000067$ LC_ALL=C rm foo 2>&1 | od -c0000000   r   m   :       c   a   n   n   o   t       r   e   m   o   v0000020   e       '   f   o   o   '   :       N   o       s   u   c   h0000040       f   i   l   e       o   r       d   i   r   e   c   t   o0000060   r   y  \n0000063