Aucbvax.4034 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Thu Sep 24 23:06:05 1981 Re: rm and shell metacharacters >From MathStat.jmrubin@Berkeley Thu Sep 24 14:03:34 1981 Two ways of making rm safer: (1) Let it become default interactive if some environmental variable is set to a non-null value. Preferably, there should be a flag to just get back to normal, and -f should turn interaction off. (2) Move /ab/cde/file to /ab/cde/#file in lieu of re- moving it. Then, there has to be either a recursive cleanout of such files at logout, (from the home directory down) or a periodic garbage collector daemon. This system is similar to the TOPS-20 and it comes from the Rand mhmail system. The Rand mhmail programs don't take care of rm'ing # files, but, in practice, this doesn't matter too much for the mail system, because the files that get #'s are either called draft or have a numerical name, so such files don't usually proliferate. It would matter if it were done in general; I'm not sure what Rand does to prevent backup proliferation. Joel Rubin ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.