ugh.book

Accidents Will Happen 23

chainsaw was just a rite of passage for its users.” “May it please the court,
we will show that getting bilked of their life savings by Mr. Keating was
just a rite of passage for those retirees.” Right.

Changing rm’s Behavior Is Not an Option

After being bitten by rm a few times, the impulse rises to alias the rm com-
mand so that it does an “rm -i” or, better yet, to replace the rm command
with a program that moves the files to be deleted to a special hidden direc-
tory, such as ~/.deleted. These tricks lull innocent users into a false sense
of security.

Date: Mon, 16 Apr 90 18:46:33 199

From: Phil Agre <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: deletion

On our system, “rm” doesn’t delete the file, rather it renames in some

obscure way the file so that something called “undelete” (not

“unrm”) can get it back.

This has made me somewhat incautious about deleting files, since of

course I can always undelete them. Well, no I can’t. The Delete File

command in Emacs doesn’t work this way, nor does the D command

in Dired. This, of course, is because the undeletion protocol is not

part of the operating system’s model of files but simply part of a

kludge someone put in a shell command that happens to be called

“rm.”

As a result, I have to keep two separate concepts in my head, “delet-

ing” a file and “rm’ing” it, and remind myself of which of the two of

them I am actually performing when my head says to my hands

“delete it.”

Some Unix experts follow Phil’s argument to its logical absurdity and
maintain that it is better not to make commands like rm even a slight bit
friendly. They argue, though not quite in the terms we use, that trying to
make Unix friendlier, to give it basic amenities, will actually make it
worse. Unfortunately, they are right.