[Gllug] 'safe' deletion of files

[David Damerell]

On Friday, 13 Aug 2004, Ian Scott wrote:
>I suppose that if you want this, a flag to rm (rm --safe??) is the right way 
>to do it.  That way, you have a command that works like normal rm unless you
>tell it not to - and users can set up their aliases as they wish.

That's still a bad plan if the user will ever use UNIX systems where
they may not have such an alias. Some bonehead at Red Hat aliased
root's "rm" to "rm -i" to set people up for _really_ spectacular
foot-shootings. 

>My problem with this is more philosophical.  I expect unix to do what I tell
>it.  That means I expect rm to remove. 

I want a tool that really honest-to-God blows files away, but I don't
have a problem with _also_ having a tool that marks files for removal
at some later date and declutters them from my filespace in the meantime.

>On a side issue, why do we use rm?   I suspect that 'to clear up space on a 
>disk' would come near the top of the list...

In these days of humungous discs that's less of a problem. You might
not be able to afford to back up the "safely" deleted files, but
provided that's well-understood...

[When I was working with a system with a snapshotting filesystem, I
always told people who got accidentally removed files retrieved from
it how very lucky they had been, so they would not come to rely on
it.] 

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> Distortion Field!
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