Worm/Passwords (actuall alternate rm programs)

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <135 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:

>Why is this a partial answer?  Well, there are lots of scripts around
>that just blindly use their caller's path, and they'd get the safe "rm",
>thus harassing users with questions as to whether they really want to
>remove /tmp/xa012237a, /tmp/xa012237b, /tmp/xa012237c, /tmp/xa012237d,
>and so on.
>
>Anyone got a better solution?  (Yeah, I know, rewrite all those @#$!@#
>scripts.  I said "a better solution".  Maybe we could rewrite all the
>intro-to-Unix books so they don't mention "rm". ;-)

I am in the process of designing for Project Athena a suite of
file-deletion utilities which allow for file recovery (Can you say
"design review?"  I knew you could. :-).  This suite will replace rm
and rmdir with a program called delete (intuitive, isn't it?) and add
a few other commands (lsdel, undelete, expunge, purge), but we decided
very early on that we wouldn't really *replace* rm and rmdir, that is,
we would not give the new programs the same names as the old ones, for
the very reason mentioned here.

We decided to place delete somewhere in the standard user's path and
to modify all Project Athena documentation to recommend the use of
delete.

Furthermore, although delete will be more user-friendly than rm ever
was, it can be made to act exactly like rm or rmdir (it replaces both
of them) by giving it certain command-line arguments.  Therefore,
someone who wants to continue to type "rm" and "rmdir" and have the
file-recovery option available to him/her cna alias rm and rmdir to
the proper delete commands.

I think that this way, we have the best of both worlds.... new users
of Project Athena get a real file-deletion utility that is
user-friendly and intelligent, while experienced users can get the
same interface as rm or rmdir and still have the ability to recover
accidentally deleted files.

Finally, since I assume that most shell scripts aren't going to read
the user's .cshrc or .profile file (or at least they *shouldn't*),
they won't get any aliases that the user might have defined, so
they'll use the correct rm, i.e. the real one.

  Jonathan Kamens
  MIT '91 -- Project Athena Watchmaker
  jik at Athena.MIT.EDU