bug#15926: RFE: unlink command already uses 'unlink' call; make 'rm' use (original) (raw)

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From: Bernhard Voelker
Subject: bug#15926: RFE: unlink command already uses 'unlink' call; make 'rm' use 'remove' call
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 08:12:45 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130329 Thunderbird/17.0.5

On 11/21/2013 03:07 AM, Eric Blake wrote:

On 11/20/2013 05:03 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: > What about the following? > > $ src/rm -r src/. > src/rm: refusing to remove '.' or '..' directory: skipping 'src/.'

That helps.

Thanks, I'll push it unless someone comes up with a better wording.

But I'm also starting to think we should add a new long option --no-preserve-dot, similar to how --no-preserve-root can be used to work around the restriction. Then people that want to can create an alias or other wrapper around rm to get the non-nanny behavior, while the default behavior still complies with POSIX.

Admittedly, compared to the academic question behind "--no-preserve-root" (which is like "what happens to me when the globe under my feet disappears?"), there may be more real-world reasons to remove ".".

However, as it's possible to pass the canonicalized file name of "." or ".." to rm(1), I'm not yet convinced that it warrants adding a new --no-preserve-dot-or-dotdot (and for symmetry reasons a new --preserve-dot-or-dotdot) option.

Have a nice day, Berny