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.


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