Jim Meyering wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (James Youngman) wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 08:45:05PM +0000, Eric Blake wrote: > >> This puts the invocation of rm without arguments in the > >> implementation's realm, where currently, coreutils is not consistent > >> on what it returns:
Without belaboring consistency I believe it is doing exactly the right thing to do. > >> $ rm > >> rm: missing operand > >> Try `rm --help' for more information. > >> $ echo $? # used improperly > >> 1 > >> $ rm -f > >> $ echo $? # all (zero) calls to unlink succeeded > >> 0 > > > > Personally I think this is exactly the right way to do it (both > > cases). > > Same here. > > FYI, Solaris' /bin/rm is similar (though it's 2 and 0). > On NetBSD 1.6 /bin/rm exits with status 1 in both cases. I know that if this behavior changed it would break a lot of scripts. It is very common to see variables in the rm -f which may not be expanded. It is often counted upon that rm -f without arguments will not be an error. This is very useful behavior. rm -f $TMPS # where $TMPS might not be set > >>Are there any systems out there where "rm -f ``" has non-zero status? Not that I know of and that would include GNU, BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Solaris. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
