On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 11:31:09AM -0700, Bill Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| > > Or my favorite:
| > > rm -rf .*
| > > thinking it will remove the current directory OR all the dotfiles in the
| > > current directory ... and are root.
| > I assume this will delete everything from the parent directory down? at least ls
|.* appears to return the .. dir as well. hmm pretty scary.
| It will limb it's way back up the tree to /.
It will not.
| I've seen it.
I'd give good odds you've misinterpreted some subtly different incantation,
or been just below the root dir anyway.
While we're bitching about rm, anyone know how to fix its prompting behaviour?
On normal UNIXen the incantation
rm blah
will prompt for removal if you haven't write permission to blah as a sanity
check. Naturally,
rm -f blah
doesn't ask.
If I leave off the -f flag GNU rm seems to ask about _every_ bloody
file. This makes it so close to useless that one must use -f all the
time. Which is VERY VERY BAD, because it makes habitual the "don't do
any sanity checks at all" mode. Dangerous in the extreme.
Does GNU rm have some saner middle ground? The manual entry is
unhelpful (no surprise there with the GNU manuals, on the whole; you
can spare me the "bad info is the One True Path" mantra, thanks).
Cheers,
--
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/
The road is my shepherd and I shall not stop.
- Sam Eliott, Road Hogs MTV 1993
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