Versions non-solution

[Brandon Allbery]

> Article <> From: rcd at opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn)
+---------------
| > Good grief!  I thought that everyone had aliased "rm" to "mv".
| 
| Huh?!  Are we trying to solve the problem by ignoring it?
| 
| > Try putting these lines in your .cshrc:
| > 
| > # safe rm.  moves things to /tmp, where the system can garbage collect
| > alias   rm      'mv \!* /tmp/wunder'
| > 
| > You are free to use your own login name instead of mine for your...
| 
| This doesn't work well in the face of system crashes if your system works
| as ours does, in two respects:
| 
| 	We don't have a lot of space in /tmp.  Making everyone else's
| 	compilations (etc., etc.) bomb out so that you can have your own
| 	personal file wastebasket overflowing is not kindly regarded around
| 	here.
| 
| 	We clean out /tmp on rebooting (as happens after a crash), so if
| 	the files you want to hang on to happen to be needed because of a
| 	crash while you were doing something, they'll all get blown away at
| 	the worst time.
| 
| And, of course, there's the oops-I'm-in-the-wrong-directory routine--you go
| to clean up /tmp/myself only you space out the cd or some such and end up
| cleaning out your work directory.  For most of the clever backup schemes,
| there's a standard screwup that will zorch them.  In the end, there's no
| substitute for plain old common stupidity...er, I mean...

Hmmm, 'alias rm rm -i; alias remove /bin/rm' is 9/10 of the problem.
Of course, you can still foul it up... and since I also sometimes mess
up a file in the editor, I have a vi front-end to create .B:files in
the directory where the file I'm editing is.  Only one backup is kept
per file.  And it's relatively difficult to delete .B:* without knowing
you've fouled up (rm .* will yell about removing .. and . long before
it gets that far).  The /tmp soulution is out; until just recently, we
had the following disk space allocation:

	/dev/root   - 12M (also /tmp and /dev/swap)
	/dev/hd1    - 8M
	/dev/fd0    - 1.2M
	/dev/fd1    - 1.2M
		-the latter being floppies that might not be mounted
		or might be only single-sided for .6M.  There was barely
		enough room for my .B:file backups, much less /tmp/bsa.

On the system I describe above (at work), I use both schemes.  On the
system I'm writing from (hobby system, tdi1 isn't on the net) I only
use the rm alias.  I lose too much with the other -- it isn't smart enough
to allow 'vi +5 file' or such -- maybe I'll hack a copy of vistart as
provided in net.sources a while back.

--bsa