On Sat, May 05, 2001 at 04:47:47PM -0500, Phil Mendelsohn wrote:
> On Sat, 5 May 2001, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> > > If you need that kind of protection,
> > > 
> > > alias rm='rm -i'
> 
> That's what Dave said.  rm doesn't need to alias to rm -i, only 
> rm -(any flags) *.

I will continue to disagree...

If you had an application which created a crapload of little temporary
files as it ran (of course, no _real_ application makes temporary files,
right?), all in its own directory, say /var/foo, then forcing rm to be -i
any time * is passed as a parameter makes it a little more difficult for
that program to clean up after itself - and substantially more difficult
for you to clean up after it manually if it crashes.

Or perhaps you discover a user who's been hoarding pr0n on your server
(but, again, no _real_ user would ever do that).  There's a directory
with 6573 jpgs of Natalie Portman (naked and petrified, of course) to
get rid of.  If 'rm *' ignores -f and insists on being -i, you're going
to be there all day pressing 'y'.

It could even lead to people setting up a new alias:

alias rm='yes | rm'

in order to bypass the command's overprotectiveness.  And I know that
I would be one of them.

> > "Unix does not stop you from doing stupid things, because stopping you from
> > doing stupid things would stop you from doing clever things."

Thanks for mentioning this one, Carl.  I agree absolutely.  Some clever
things look stupid (and vice-versa) and computers can't tell the difference.

-- 
That's not gibberish...  It's Linux. - Byers, The Lone Gunmen
Geek Code 3.1:  GCS d? s+: a- C++ UL++$ P++>+++ L+++>++++ E- W--(++) N+ o+
!K w---$ O M- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5++ X+ R++ tv b+ DI++++ D G e* h+ r y+