Eric Blake wrote:
The rm utility is forbidden to remove the names dot and dot-dot in order to avoid the consequences of inadvertently doing something like: rm −r .*
--- Which is why, IMO, I thought rm -r .* should ask if they really want to remove all files under "." as the first question, as it would show up first in such a situation. As stated before, I am more interested in the "-f"=force it anyway option, that says to let it fail, and continue, ignoring failure. I think that may be where the problem has been introduced. I never used rm - . Certainly rm ** is easier to mistype than rm -r .* so by that logic, that should be disallowed as well? I submit it is the behavior of "-f" that has changed -- and that it used to mean "force" -- continue in spite of errors, and it is that behavior that has changed, as I would would always have expected rm -r . to at least return some error I didn't care about -- What I wanted was the depth-first removal, and -f to force it to continue despite errors. How long has -f NOT meant "--force" -- as now it only overlooks write protection errors which sounds very weak.
