On 11/21/2013 03:07 AM, Eric Blake wrote: > On 11/20/2013 05:03 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: >> What about the following? >> >> $ src/rm -r src/. >> src/rm: refusing to remove '.' or '..' directory: skipping 'src/.' > > That helps.
Thanks, I'll push it unless someone comes up with a better wording. > But I'm also starting to think we should add a new long > option --no-preserve-dot, similar to how --no-preserve-root can be used > to work around the restriction. Then people that want to can create an > alias or other wrapper around rm to get the non-nanny behavior, while > the default behavior still complies with POSIX. Admittedly, compared to the academic question behind "--no-preserve-root" (which is like "what happens to me when the globe under my feet disappears?"), there may be more real-world reasons to remove ".". However, as it's possible to pass the canonicalized file name of "." or ".." to rm(1), I'm not yet convinced that it warrants adding a new --no-preserve-dot-or-dotdot (and for symmetry reasons a new --preserve-dot-or-dotdot) option. Have a nice day, Berny
