fixing rm * (was: Worm/Passwords)

[Jakob Riis]

In article <711 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>In article <1670 at ski.cs.vu.nl> biep at cs.vu.nl (J A Biep Durieux) writes:
>>At the very least, 'rm * .o' should refuse to do anything when the file '.o'
>>doesn't exist.
>
>I have posted a "del" command to comp.sources.unix which does this.

EXACTLY !!

Make new commands, don't mess around with the old ones.

I agree that users need to be protected: Give them safer commands, Menu shells
or PullDown help screens, nurse them good, but don't take away the alertness
to the real thing - Unix is fast and dangerous, real progreammers reread their
"rm" statements twice !!
Don't let users expect that "rm -r *" will help them trim their filesystem
by asking them to confirm each file. Teach a user that, and watch his face
running on another system one day !!
B.T.W:
Think of the portability - 100.000+ shell scripts that needs to be rewritten.
We have enough trouble with differences between BSD and V, Csh, Bsh, Ksh etc.
as it is.

(Just my 2 cents opinion)

Jakob Riis				 ___________________________________
NCR Systems Engineering Copenhagen      |                                   |
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