Seems to be a topic by itself, so I moved it to a seperate thread.

As with many things: need to know what version of HMC software you are referring to. Maybe it was a bug, or something else surprising.

I have just tried cp .ssh/auth* . and rm auth* from my hscroot HOME directory (doing ls -la ahead of time to be sure I was not destroying anything ahead of time.

Basically, either using ssh remotely, or logging in and using the commands from the CLI I see no reason rm will not work - other than you must supply the entire path name - as in: rm .ssh/? to remove all single character files from the .ssh directory.

So, if you continue to have problems: please:
lshmc -V # note capital V