karsh@geowhiz.UUCP (Bruce Karsh) (04/12/85)
Several people have written to tell me that the program rm-damnit is not needed. I.e. you can do the same thing in different ways. Here is a sample of the responses. > Uh. I hate to burst your bubble. But doesn't > rm -i > do the same thing? What is suggested usually is: rm -i * That doesn't work (at least on my machine) because the shell expansion of * strips the high bit of the file names. A better suggestion was proposed by one person: rm -ir . This will indeed work, but: 1) It puts your whole directory tree at (a small) risk. Rm-damnit does not do a recursive search. (Admittedly you don't have to search the whole tree, but you do kind of expose the whole tree to the rm command.) 2) Rm-damnit is easily understood, remembered, and used by less sophisticated users. It comes with a handy man page that (I hope) clearly describes how and why to use it. I look at rm-damnit as a nice convenience, nothing more. It is nowhere written that UN*X can have only one file remover program. I hope that this program can be of use to some people. If you find it to be overly redundant or unnecessary, please accept my apologies. Otherwise, use it in good health. -- Bruce Karsh | U. Wisc. Dept. Geology and Geophysics | 1215 W Dayton, Madison, WI 53706 | This space for rent. (608) 262-1697 | {ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!geowhiz!karsh |