On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 02:04:38PM +0100, P?draig Brady wrote: > I'm not sure an option like this would help much. > It might give a false sense of security more than anything.
On the contrary, I have been in precisely the situation where it would help, which is why I wrote this patch. ;-) I'm not sure what false sense of security this would give. The option clearly does not prevent removal of files system-wide. It prevents removal of those files in the blacklist during a particular invocation of `rm'. What's confusing about that? It's not a replacement for backups; it's purely there, in my mind, as a convenient safeguard against accidental removal of files. After all, do you really want to hunt down that file and restore it? An option that saves you anywhere from 10 minutes to hours figuring out what you deleted and restoring it seems like a big win. > Between rm -I, immutable flags, ACLS and backups > one is suitably covered. These all have problems that I explained in the original email and above. I'd like to mention with respect to the usefulness of the patch that the perl wrapper, safe-rm, seems popular enough to prove its usefulness. It's been in Ubuntu's universe repository as far back as Intrepid. Integrating the functionality with coreutils allows us to improve on it in a number of ways. Thanks for your consideration, Dan
