17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
11:21 a.m.
On 12/17/2011 10:48 AM, Kevin Schoedel wrote:
At 10:32 am -0800 2011/12/17, Josh Dersch wrote:
Well, that and the fact that getting "rm" (or del) to behave the way I
suggest actually requires low-level changes to the shell's wildcard
expansion (*and* thus would require a change to all all tools) mean
it'll never work.
I'm aware of this. I started out suggesting things I'd fix in a perfect
world -- my hypothesis was "it's possible to make a user-friendly CLI
that helps both novices and experts" and I used the
earlier-bandied-about "rm *" issue as one thing that could be improved
upon. I don't think Unix can realistically be fixed in this regard --
as you've stated (and I also stated in an earlier mail) the backwards
compatibility problems are insurmountable.
- Josh
(quick question -- how often in a given week do
you run "rm *" ? How
much longer would it take you to append "-y" to those invocations?)
How
much longer would it take to 'fix' all the scripts that use rm, and how
much longer would it take to clean up after the damage caused by the bugs
introduced? Unix commands are part of a programming system; standalone
interactive use is a minority use case. If you want a new command, write a
new command. You can even call it "del".