Unix shell design [was Re: Yes, Unix can do batch renames - Re: Unix handles file extensions "very poorly"?]

There is some truth to this; it would be defensible to instead make rm grow a -warn-about-* option (presumably not spelled quite that way :) rather than warning by default and having a -don't-warn-about-* option (spelled -y in the above strawman). This is completely misunderstanding the point. rm -i warns about every removal, even the completely innocuous ones. That may be what you want, but it's not what we ("we" = "me and, IIUC, Josh") want. We want a mode of operation in which most rm commands do exactly what you say, just go off and work, but in the case where the arglist as typed contains a bare *, it requires confirmation. You may not want that. Fine; you don't have to use it. Even the strawman above doesn't make it impossible, nor even very difficult, to get that; you just alias rm to rm -y, or in the variant I sketched above, you don't alias rm to rm -warn-about-* while we do. This is actually missing much of the point, I think. It is somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that in Unix, because the Unix design enforces a fairly hard separation between the shell and the commands it runs. Doing this requires inventing some way to - interactively - get information flowing between the shell and the command that might be getting run without/before actually pulling the trigger on the command in question. This is a lot easier to do in a Lisp world, because everything is in the same Lisp world, so, for example, "commands" can be decorated with advice and properties and such explaining to the CLI how to do this. I'm not sure what tack I'd take to build such a thing in Unix. But I think it is a very productive idea to think about it; even though I don't like that style of interaction on a Lisp Machine, the reasons apply somewhere between far less and not at all to Unix, and the infrastructure necessary to support it in Unix would enable a lot of other interesting stuff - unless you do it all as a huge collection of special cases in the wrong places, which, in the case of rm, is where we came in. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B