Jim Meyering wrote:
These commands would evoke an invalid diagnostic:
$ mkdir d && ln -s d s && env rm -r s/
rm: cannot remove 's': Too many levels of symbolic links
remove.c was stripping trailing slashes from "s/" before passing
the name to "rm". But a trailing slash may change the semantics,
and thus should not be stripped.
I would assert that the trailing "." shouldn't be stripped either.
If the directory is a mount point -- then "." would indicate the
contents of the mount point -- being after the "/", while the "/" would be
the mount point itself.
In my case, I wanted to delete everything in the mount point. Removal
of the mount point itself would ideally unmount the 'fs', but I won't hold
my breath on that one (and leave the root inode of the file system in
the unmounted file system -- thus I've effectively removed "." from
mountpoint/.
Which is different from the "." of a directory entry -- NO I'm not
asking for this as a feature, I'm just saying it would be a valid semantic
paradigm"). I WOULD want rm dir foobar/. to remove all contents in the
directory before failing on ".". The original version of posix didn't have
this restriction/problem. POSIX is portability standard -- it should not
be regarded as a restrictive standard, unless not doing so would hinder
portability. In effect, they are disallowing OS's to make extensions beyond
what they allow in the newer standards...
That goes WAY beyond a portability standard...
