On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Max Laier wrote:
At very least you should consider to error out silently as POSIX requires "-f" to be silent. Other than that you should really look into the standards and what they way about rm and friends.
Personally, I would want it to throw an error for the exit, but I do not know the standard.
I am not a fan of providing seat belts like this. People concerned about this, can "alias rm 'rm -i'" etc. etc. Others have commented like this ...
Seat belts that prevent a destructive action that may be desired only .0000001% (or much less) of the time do not bother me especially when the action is from a common tool. If the tool was rarely used (i.e., fdisk), or the action was desired much more often, then I could see a complaint about it.
I already have that alias; -f overrides -i. It would drive me crazy for it to not override -i. Solaris does not allow -f to override -i and will ask for everything you want to delete recursively. I had to always type '/bin/rm -rf <dir>' to go around this. Highly annoying.
If you still have to make this change, make it tuneable with a environment variable (and make it default to off).
Why not default on? root will not run 'rm -rf /' on purpose very often. Once will be enough. :) Also, when and why would someone want to do this?
Sean ----------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
