Re: shred command. Autodetect file type

[John Darrington]

On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 03:59:40PM +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
        if --remove (-u) is specified.  The default is not to remove the
        files because it is common to operate on device files like
        /dev/hda, and those files usually should not be removed.  When
        operating on regular files, most people use the --remove option.
     
        Why not use the stat system call to find out what type of file
        we're dealing with, and then remove or not remove accordingly ?
     
     That might cause a suprise in some cases.  It is better to have a
     consitent behaviour than have different behaviours for different types
     of files. 

Why?  Other core GNU commands modify their behaviour based upon the
file type.  For example tar and ls treat their arguments differently
depending upon whether they are names of directories or names of
files.

It seems to me that the most common case would be that the shredded
file should be deleted, so that should be the default.  If the user
doesn't want that then she can override it with a flag.

J'

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