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Quoth Eamon Caddigan (Sun 2004-05-30 03:07:15PM +0000): |
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> marduk <marduk@g.o> wrote: |
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> |
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> > Don't change rm's default behavior. There is nothing wrong with rm. |
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> > There are many people who have for years (decades?) used rm and expect |
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> > it to work a certain way, i.e. the Unix way, which is to (wrongly?) |
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> > assume the user knows what she is doing and to quietly exit |
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> > successfully. If you must have new behavior, have a new command, say |
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> > gentoorm. Or if you must mess with rm, make sure by default it uses |
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> > traditional Unix behavior unless you pass it |
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> > --some-nonstandard-option-that-otherwise-breaks-rm. But please don't |
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> > change the way most people expect rm to work. |
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> |
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> Argumentum ad antiquitam. I'm aware of many good arguments for keeping |
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> 'rm' the way it is, but "because it's always been that way" isn't the |
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> strongest. :) |
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Sure it is. Have you noticed that the behaviour of basic Unix commands |
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(cp, rm, mv, echo, cat, grep, sed... and so on, almost ad nauseum) has |
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not changed since the days of yore? Sure, new behaviour has been added, |
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and in the case of lots of the GNU stuff, the new behaviour is almost |
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always used, but it has to be enabled somehow. The defaults have |
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remained the same! This is important! Do you know how many shell |
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scripts the average sysadmin has in his toolkit? Scripts that were |
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written years ago, and have been honed to a razor-sharp point, scripts |
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that might actually be bug-free? Now, what would happen if the |
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*default* behaviour of 'rm' or 'mv' changed? Most likely, a |
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catastrophe! |
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This is why aliases like Red Hat sets up for rm, mv, and cp are |
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a terrible idea in my opinion. Creating aliases like 'safe-rm' and |
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so on would be much better, because then the conditioning would |
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lead to 'bash: safe-rm: command not found', instead of 'rm' |
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"failing" to prompt you and thus enabling you to do untold damage |
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to a production system. |
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|
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> As for nonstandard options, that's exactly what I propose. Appealing to |
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> tradition myself, I should point out that Linux has a rich history of |
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> adding nonstandard options to ancient UNIX commands. |
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I assume that, in this context, by "Linux", you actually mean "GNU", |
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right? |
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Add non-standard options all you want, but *do not* change the |
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default behaviour of core commands! |
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|
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-- |
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Josh Glover |
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|
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Gentoo Developer (http://dev.gentoo.org/~jmglov/) |
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Tokyo Linux Users Group Listmaster (http://www.tlug.jp/) |
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|
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GPG keyID 0xDE8A3103 (C3E4 FA9E 1E07 BBDB 6D8B 07AB 2BF1 67A1 DE8A 3103) |
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gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys DE8A3103 |
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