Agreed. Plus, it’s unmistakable that rm meant “remove” when you examine her sister “rmdir.” I think it’s a bit more interesting to uncover why rm does not remove directories by default thereby obviating the need for rmdir—-especially since the potentially nightmarish incantation of “rm -rf” does include files, folders and just about everything else in between. Bill Corcoran On Apr 25, 2018, at 5:36 PM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com<mailto:jpl.jpl@gmail.com>> wrote: Another country heard from.<http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue49/fischer.html> I doubt the Robert Morris story, given that a command as fundamental as "rm" must have come about very early in the development, and there isn't a pattern of naming commands after their authors. On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 1:22 PM, Eric Blood <winkywooster@gmail.com<mailto:winkywooster@gmail.com>> wrote: I came across this yesterday: I was curious if there's any truth to it. I found http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl and was poking around but couldn't determine when the rm command came about. Thoughts? -- Eric Blood winkywooster@gmail.com<mailto:winkywooster@gmail.com>

Hi Bill, Well, I'd guess it's: rm just does a single unlink to decrement an inode's reference count by one, actually increment it since they were negative, whereas rmdir on an empty directory needs to do two decrements, one for its directory entry in the parent, and one for `..'. (I think hard links could apply to directories in the early days, until it made things too awkward, e.g. du(1) and cycles.) -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy