Re: Susu and Rum patch for coreutils-5.2.1

[James Youngman]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 05:55:55PM +0200, Alpt wrote:

> The second patch is rum.
> You can directly read the readme here:
> http://www.freaknet.org/alpt/src/utils/rum/
> 
> With the rum patch, rm will look at /etc/rm.conf and ~/.rm.conf, it will load 
> a
> list of protected files and directories, and it will not delete them.
> To force the deletion of a protected entry the -ff option must be used.
> (ex: rm -rff /etc).
> I could't test the ROOT_CAN_UNLINK_DIRS case.

This strikes me as about as useful as

        alias rm="rm -i"

... which is to say, it's handy right up to the day when you assume
it's in effect on a machine, only to find that it is not.  Then you've
accidentally deleted valuable files by mistake.  In my opinion it's
not such a great idea to have a feature that users come to rely on
from doing something unfortunate, unless that feature is available
everywhere.  Quite a number of years ago I typed "rm -rf /tmp/ *".  My
working directory was /.  That was a learning experience.

People disagree over whether "#" is pronounced "hash" or "pound".  I
pronounce it "Think before pressing return!".

Regards,
James.