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On 18/05/07 06:18, Micah Cowan wrote:
> A user, timothy, describing his difficulties at:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/113154
>
> describes his frustration as a new user, in discovering the hard way
> that tar's default is to overwrite existing files, causing him to lose
> important data.
>
> While I'm opposed to fixing the problem in tar itself, as traditional
> usage frequently relies upon this behavior, I don't see why we couldn't
> make the experience of using tar interactively a little safer, by
> providing a default alias for tar in /etc/skel/.bashrc that backs-up
> existing files.
>
> Comments?
>
Ironically, I suspect that you're damned if you do and damned if you
don't. A similar overwriting happens with the mv command. I strongly
suspect that you can make an argument either way. In the days of yore,
DOS had similar behaviours with the copy command.
What I see here is a classic example of an expectation mismatch. The
new user expects the computer to almost "honour" their data, the more
experienced user expects the computer to do what it is told.
There is something to be said for your proposal, if we keep in mind
the "do no harm" approach, but then you would need to do that for all
such commands. That is a long and slippery slope to head down. Perhaps
another way of resolving this is that any and all GUI tools should
warn or not overwrite unless specifically told to, and the command
line tools should do what their man page says that they will.
Perhaps when a user launches a terminal for the first time, a dialog
pops up that says something along the lines of:
Commands entered within a Terminal screen may not work as you
expect. Sometimes a command will overwrite files without warning
you. If you are unsure, use the 'man' command to find out.
Of course a completely different approach would be a file system
capable of roll-back, and in doing that, a user may well benefit from
the backup services such a solution offers.
Finally, you could probably create a "safe" terminal, but personally I
do not think that this is a good idea because then you would have a
tar command in a "safe" environment (with a --backup flag) and the
same tar command in the "unsafe" environment, causing a deferred
mismatch of expectation with potentially bigger harm down the track.
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