Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 10:42:16 -0500 (CDT) From: Sean Farley <sean-freebsd@farley.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /" Message-ID: <20041002102430.Y5481@thor.farley.org> In-Reply-To: <200410021123.59811.max@love2party.net> References: <20041002081928.GA21439@gothmog.gr> <200410021123.59811.max@love2party.net>
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On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Max Laier wrote: > At very least you should consider to error out silently as POSIX > requires "-f" to be silent. Other than that you should really look > into the standards and what they way about rm and friends. Personally, I would want it to throw an error for the exit, but I do not know the standard. > I am not a fan of providing seat belts like this. People concerned > about this, can "alias rm 'rm -i'" etc. etc. Others have commented > like this ... Seat belts that prevent a destructive action that may be desired only .0000001% (or much less) of the time do not bother me especially when the action is from a common tool. If the tool was rarely used (i.e., fdisk), or the action was desired much more often, then I could see a complaint about it. I already have that alias; -f overrides -i. It would drive me crazy for it to not override -i. Solaris does not allow -f to override -i and will ask for everything you want to delete recursively. I had to always type '/bin/rm -rf <dir>' to go around this. Highly annoying. > If you still have to make this change, make it tuneable with a > environment variable (and make it default to off). Why not default on? root will not run 'rm -rf /' on purpose very often. Once will be enough. :) Also, when and why would someone want to do this? Sean ----------------------- sean-freebsd@farley.org
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