On 1/6/21 10:56 AM, John Wiersba via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
$ touch asdf && chmod a-w asdf && rm asdf 2>&1 | catrm: remove write-protected
regular empty file 'asdf'? # should*not* prompt
If the prompt cannot be seen, then it can't be properly answered, so there is
no point in prompting and consequently leaving the user with a hanging command
and no way to know what's being expected of them. Instead rm should attempt to
remove the file and succeed or fail based on the result.
POSIX requires the current behavior; see clause 3 in:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/rm.html
Although GNU rm needn't follow POSIX blindly, it's doubtful that rm
should remove the file in this particular case, as the longstanding
tradition is that plain "rm" does not remove unwriteable files without
more confirmation.
Since you know about "rm -f" I suggest using that (that's what everyone
else does...).
