> The system is stock slackware 13.37 on my vanilla home desktop pc, of > which I am the sole user.
Should be okay. I was worried that it was some cross compiled program on a system that was not unix-like. > Here is the data you requested. ext4 seems reasonable. I was worried it was some strange network filesystem and so had unusual behavior. > With this new set of swp files behavior is exactly as you said it > should be. Good! :-) > Is there any way I can recover the original set of swp files that I > removed, or is rm for keeps? Not usually. Especially on journaled filesystems the data is reclaimed quickly. > ~ $echo *.swp > *.swp No matches. > ~ $ls -ldog *.swp > ls: cannot access *.swp: No such file or directory No files matched. So if you were using 'rm *.swp' then rm wouldn't have any files to remove either. > ~ $echo $0 > bash Bash should behave normally. Was worried that it was some other different shell that had interesting behavior. zsh for example can have some interesting behavior if given **/*.swp. > ~ $ls -ldog /bin/sh > lrwxrwxrwx 1 4 Oct 22 04:56 /bin/sh -> bash I was only concerned about /bin/sh if $0 happened to be /bin/sh. Since it is bash then we can stop there. I really think that now that you know what is going on that you won't be able to recreate any test cases where 'rm -rf *.swp' removes any files that are not in the current directory. Bob
