On 22/01/2023 18:18, Philip Rowlands wrote:
On Sat, 21 Jan 2023, at 13:05, Łukasz Sroka wrote:
When the input files contain duplicates, then the rm fails. Because
duplicates occur most often when the * is used and the shell unwraps it.
There is a very common scenario when a user accidentally enters space
after a filename, or enters space instead of forward slash.
To fail on duplicate FILE args, this bash function would do (lightly tested,
doesn't attempt getopt processing):
function safe_rm {
local -A seen
local file
for file in "$@"; do
if [[ -v ${seen[$file]} ]]; then
echo "error: duplicate name '$file'" 1>&2
return 1
fi
seen[$file]=1
done
# no dupes seen
command rm "$@"
}
and could be used today, without waiting for the next coreutils release.
That's informative, thanks.
As an aside, I could be reading it wrong but the coreutils manual suggests the
file arguments are optional
rm [option]… [file]…
Right with the -f option rm will not fail if no arguments are specified
(in the presence of nullglob etc.), which is POSIX compliant.
cheers,
Pádraig
