22 Welcome, New User! Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 15:51 CST From: ram@attcan.uucp Subject: Re: rm * Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers I too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file system from my disk which was something like /usr/foo/bin. I was in / usr/foo and had removed several parts of the system by: % rm -r ./etc % rm -r ./adm …and so on. But when it came time to do ./bin, I missed the period. System didn’t like that too much. Unix wasn’t designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its /bin direc- tory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to recover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operat- ing system inoperable). Unix aficionados accept occasional file deletion as normal. For example, consider following excerpt from the comp.unix.questions FAQ:3 6) How do I “undelete” a file? Someday, you are going to accidentally type something like: % rm * .foo and find you just deleted “*” instead of “*.foo”. Consider it a rite of passage. Of course, any decent systems administrator should be doing regular backups. Check with your sysadmin to see if a recent backup copy of your file is available. “A rite of passage”? In no other industry could a manufacturer take such a cavalier attitude toward a faulty product. “But your honor, the exploding gas tank was just a rite of passage.” “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we will prove that the damage caused by the failure of the safety catch on our 3comp.unix.questions is an international bulletin-board where users new to the Unix Gulag ask questions of others who have been there so long that they don’t know of any other world. The FAQ is a list of Frequently Asked Questions gar- nered from the reports of the multitudes shooting themselves in the feet.

Accidents Will Happen 23 chainsaw was just a rite of passage for its users.” “May it please the court, we will show that getting bilked of their life savings by Mr. Keating was just a rite of passage for those retirees.” Right. Changing rm’s Behavior Is Not an Option After being bitten by rm a few times, the impulse rises to alias the rm com- mand so that it does an “rm -i” or, better yet, to replace the rm command with a program that moves the files to be deleted to a special hidden direc- tory, such as ~/.deleted. These tricks lull innocent users into a false sense of security. Date: Mon, 16 Apr 90 18:46:33 199 From: Phil Agre agre@gargoyle.uchicago.edu To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: deletion On our system, “rm” doesn’t delete the file, rather it renames in some obscure way the file so that something called “undelete” (not “unrm”) can get it back. This has made me somewhat incautious about deleting files, since of course I can always undelete them. Well, no I can’t. The Delete File command in Emacs doesn’t work this way, nor does the D command in Dired. This, of course, is because the undeletion protocol is not part of the operating system’s model of files but simply part of a kludge someone put in a shell command that happens to be called “rm.” As a result, I have to keep two separate concepts in my head, “delet- ing” a file and “rm’ing” it, and remind myself of which of the two of them I am actually performing when my head says to my hands “delete it.” Some Unix experts follow Phil’s argument to its logical absurdity and maintain that it is better not to make commands like rm even a slight bit friendly. They argue, though not quite in the terms we use, that trying to make Unix friendlier, to give it basic amenities, will actually make it worse. Unfortunately, they are right.