On Nov 18, 2013, at 10:37, Rick Varney wrote: > So for Redhat 5, rm does seem to give read-only files some special > treatment. The fact that rm on your OS does not makes me wonder if I am > wrong about how typical this behavior is in other Linux/Unix flavors.
Both GNU rm (used on Linux) and BSD rm (used on OS X and *BSD) do this. From the BSD rm manpage on OS X 10.9: DESCRIPTION The rm utility attempts to remove the non-direc- tory type files specified on the command line. If the permissions of the file do not permit writing, and the standard input device is a ter- minal, the user is prompted (on the standard error output) for confirmation.