I don't think this is quite true in Germany either - or at least not in the generality that I read into your question.  

Here is example 1 (Promotionsordnung (PhD bylaws) for psychology and sport, Muenster), and another randomly selected example 2 (Promotionsordnung math, Bonn).  Both stipulate much more restrictive conditions that relate to your question. They somewhat overlap, but not completely - so there is also no uniform answer for Germany. Simply stepping away from a PhD early on would not be a problem in either case. The restrictions on the number of attempts to be successfully awarded a PhD are as follows:  

Example 1: you get one and one only attempt to resubmit a declined thesis, and to re-take the oral defense each    

Example 2: no restrictions are mentioned on the number of failed thesis attempts. You get one attempt to re-take a failed defense  

In particular given that even these two sources don't agree, you just need to pull your program's Promotionsordnung, and confirm which rules apply to you. 

After what period of time does a PhD position count towards the two possible attempts in Germany?
I've accidentally redirected the output of a CSV file to my directory.  How can I rm only the files that start with a number, and leave the files that start with a letter intact? 

mymachine$ ls
71.24         README.md        30            4.29
8             filter.sh        42.81         5.58         
8.36          purchases.csv    1,208.8       100          
16.7          2.56             21.78         269.96        

