[TUHS] rm command

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Thu Apr 26 08:17:16 AEST 2018


    > From: William Corcoran

    > I think it's a bit more interesting to uncover why rm does not remove
    > directories by default thereby obviating the need for rmdir

On early PDP-11 Unixes, 'rm' is an ordinary program, and 'rmdir' is
setuid-root, since it has to do special magic (writing into directory files,
etc). Given that, it made sense to have 'rm' run with the least amount of
privilege needed to do its job.

	Noel



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