"Naive" and "novice" users

[moss at BRL-VLD.ARPA]

From:      "Gary S. Moss (AMXBR-VLD-V)" <moss at BRL-VLD.ARPA>

Nothing wrong with 'unrm' except that when you run out of disk space,
you have to wait a hour to free it up, or try to decide how many files
that are in limbo WILL be removed and argue with user's about how much
they really have to pretend to remove and then as soon as it looks like
there is going to be more than enough, everyone starts 'unrm'ing it and
boy talking about complicating matters.  Take a lesson from human nature,
if 'rm' takes a certain grace period to be permanent, the users will
relax to the point that that period becomes too short.

Plus, where do you put this limbo directory where users won't abuse it
for extra disk space, ah, under their account you say, but Berkeley's
quota system is wierd enough without not being able to heed the warnings
when you exceed your quota because your limbo directory is part of your
account.  What happens when you try to 'rm' a file from limbo?

These things might seem trivial to work around, but these are just the
obvious (I know next to nothing about UNIX internals), and you better
believe that whatever the solution, the net result will be that people
are going to trash files.

What about 'mv' or 'cp'?  If someone types;

$ mv dir/* ../dir

to install an update to a large directory, would you copy all of the
../dir files that would be overwritten to limbo?  How about the files
you are 'mv'ing from dir?

Your turn,
-- Moss.