ugh.book

24 Welcome, New User!

Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 17:17 CST

From: [email protected] (Randal L. Schwartz)

Subject: Don’t overload commands! (was Re: rm *)

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

We interrupt this newsgroup to bring you the following message...

#ifdef SOAPBOX_MODE

Please, please, please do not encourage people to overload standard

commands with “safe” commands.

(1) People usually put it into their .cshrc in the wrong place, so that

scripts that want to “rm” a file mysteriously ask for confirmation,

and/or fill up the disk thinking they had really removed the file.

(2) There’s no way to protect from all things that can accidentally

remove files, and if you protect one common one, users can and will

get the assumption that “anything is undoable” (definitely not true!).

(3) If a user asks a sysadm (my current hat that I’m wearing) to assist

them at their terminal, commands don't operate normally, which is

frustrating as h*ll when you've got this user to help and four other

tasks in your “urgent: needs attention NOW” queue.

If you want an “rm” that asks you for confirmation, do an:

% alias del rm -i

AND DON'T USE RM! Sheesh. How tough can that be, people!?!

#endif

We now return you to your regularly scheduled “I've been hacking so

long we had only zeros, not ones and zeros” discussion...

Just another system hacker.

Recently, a request went out to comp.unix.questions asking sysadmins for

their favorite administrator horror stories. Within 72 hours, 300 messages

were posted. Most of them regarded losing files using methods described in

this chapter. Funny thing is, these are experienced Unix users who should

know better. Even stranger, even though millions of dollars of destruction