Re: RFC: preventing accidental deletion of system directories
* William Pitcock <nenolod@sacredspiral.co.uk> [080322 21:49]:
> Yes, that's what I mean: what's wrong with making rm -i the default
> behaviour? We could do that by simply patching coreutils.
The biggest problem with rm -i is that there is no switch reverting it.
There is -f, but that means deleting everything, and does not switch
back to the current default, which is to make possible dangerous things
interactive (deleting ro, ...) while normal deletions are not made
harder.
-i by default is a very bad decision, as -i asks even for single file
deletions, so people are trained to answer y every time they do
something, so will also answer y without reading the message when they
do something. (or to always do rm -f)
Switching to a bad default without adding a way to revert to a sane
default just means everyone will hate you.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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