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040530 Thorsten Kampe wrote: |
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> * Christian Gut (2004-05-30 11:40 +0100) |
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>> oh well, and it should move everything to a recycle bin |
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>> and asking two times if you really, really want to delete something. |
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>> Hey, this is not windows. |
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> It has to do with security. |
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> Command line deletion is always more dangerous than GUI deletion |
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> because you cannot see and physically mark the files you want to delete. |
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> The problem is simply that computer and human beings behave differently |
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> when doing multiple things at the same time or for a long time. |
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> Computers don't care how long they've been uptime, |
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> how many things they do simultaneously |
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> or if someone is disrupting their concentration. |
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> People do - and there is nothing to eliminate these things; |
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> just to put a barrier to the possible disastrous consequences. |
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|
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these msgs seem to sum up the opposite sides of the debate. |
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|
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the point i wanted to raise has nothing to do w novices, grannies or M$ : |
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it's something which can affect the most experienced red-blooded sysadmin |
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simply because for once in his life he's been working too long |
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& just before he collapses he enters a cmd w an extra space in it. |
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when machine guards, safety hats/boots etc were introduced in factories, |
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there were similar objections from old hands who "didn't need such things", |
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at least till they ended up in hospital missing a foot/hand/eye. |
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|
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yes, there are good reasons not to alter the basic default behaviour of 'rm': |
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eg thousands of scripts exist out there which depend on it. |
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however, that doesn't mean that additional flags can't be added to it. |
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|
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what is needed is a flag whose action lies between '-f' & '-i': |
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let's call it '-c' (for 'check': there are lots of spare letters to use). |
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'rm -f' & 'rm -i' would continue to do just what they always have done, |
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but unlike '-i', which asks re each file/dir individually |
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-- which is why people don't want to use it for big deletions -- , |
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'-c' would ask just once for the whole set: |
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it would show the list (after expansion by the shell) & the starting dir, |
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with a request for confirmation like that offered by Zsh; for extra safety, |
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the user would have to type 'yes', not just 'y', to confirm deletion. |
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to allow easy aliasing of 'rm -c' as 'rm', 'rm -c' wd ask for confirmation |
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just when multiple files were listed or the list was a directory |
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-- esp this would apply when '*' was expanded by the shell -- , |
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but not when there was only 1 matching file (not a dir). |
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|
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this sb enough to alert the guy who's been working 30 hr , |
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but would have no effect on all those thousands of scripts, |
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which wd continue to work with 'rm -f' just like now, |
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& no-one wb forced to use '-c', if they were willing to take the risk. |
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|
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"But that's not POSIX !" -- nor is the GNU 'rm' now used by Gentoo, |
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which has a couple of extra flags which POSIX doesn't know about. |
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|
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so is there any reason -- apart from developer time -- this can't be done ? |
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|
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-- |
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========================,,============================================ |
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SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb : purslow@××××××××××××××.ca |
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ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Centre for Urban & Community Studies |
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TRANSIT `-O----------O---' University of Toronto |
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