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Date:      Sat, 02 Oct 2004 03:52:26 -0500
From:      Ryan Sommers <ryans@gamersimpact.com>
To:        Edwin Groothuis <edwin@mavetju.org>
Cc:        Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"
Message-ID:  <415E6C4A.1010804@gamersimpact.com>
In-Reply-To: <20041002083336.GA10355@k7.mavetju>
References:  <20041002081928.GA21439@gothmog.gr> <20041002083336.GA10355@k7.mavetju>

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Edwin Groothuis wrote:

>On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 11:19:28AM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>  
>
>>John Beck, who works for Sun, has posted an entry in his blog yesterday
>>about "rm -fr /" protection, which I liked a lot:
>>http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jbeck/20041001#rm_rf_protection
>>
>>His idea was remarkably simple, so I went ahead and wrote this patch for
>>rm(1) of FreeBSD:
>>    
>>
>
>I'm not so much worried about 'rm -rf /', but I'm more worried about
>"rm -rf *" in my home directory. It happened once because I was too
>happy switching directories before realising what I was doing in
>the wrong directory.
>
>Also, refusing to do it is not the ideal way to go, I think that
>if you have two -f's specified it would do it anyway. Just my two
>cents of course.
>
>Edwin
>  
>
If you use tcsh for your shell add:

set rmstar

to your .cshrc file. Then anytime you use '*' as an argument to rm it 
will ask you if you are sure you want to do that.

As for adding this kind of oops-proofing. I'm not sure I like the idea 
of completely removing the ability to use / as an argument. How about 
prompting and needing 'yes' as input?

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans@gamersimpact.com



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