Re: RFC: preventing accidental deletion of system directories
On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 03:50:32PM -0500, William Pitcock wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 2008-03-22 at 13:51 +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> > To get those Vistaesque questions, "alias rm='rm -i'" is surely not
> > worth a
> > package. It's slightly larger in scope, but only slightly, as
> > removing
> > files as root means you mess with system directories, right?
>
> Yes, that's what I mean: what's wrong with making rm -i the default
> behaviour? We could do that by simply patching coreutils.
>
> William
Go away and learn: there have been whole flamewars on this subject :)
Red Hat (if I remember correctly) used to alias rm automatically to rm
-i . The savvy users used to unalias rm before using it.
If, when you run as root, rm always asks - you get used to it. You move
to a different system where there is no alias or someone has turned it
off - and suddenly rm MEANS rm with no breathing space.
Much better, in my opinion which is shared by some others, to _always_
have rm as rm. There's nothing to stop the cautious explicitly calling
rm as rm -i anyway - but when you need to delete large numbers of files,
rm -i is a _real_ nuisance.
AndyC
Reply to: