fixing rm * (was: Worm/Passwords)
Alan Char
achar at atari.UUCP
Tue Nov 15 10:39:36 AEST 1988
In article <672 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
|Now, how _do_ you fix "rm *"? Suppose you restrict rm to delete exactly
|one file. Watch:
| foreach F (* .o)
| rm $F
| end
|OOPS! Major bug in foreach! Better fix that.
| [ other examples ]
|
|Moral: you can't change _one_ thing.
Actually, you can change the shell. (Nowadays, that's more like three to
five things.) For example, I would REALLY appreciate in csh a variable
set expandcheck=5
So that if some shell expansion expanded to more than 5 things, it would
prompt for confirmation:
% rm * .o
*: matches 400 files, are you sure?
Comments on this idea? --Alan
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