Jimen Ching wrote:
On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, MonMotha wrote:
Maybe this (necessity for use of CLI) is the state of the art, but you
guys are talking as if we should be resigned to this situation, or even
proud of it. I am not convinced.
If the system's sitting at your desk or on your local lan where you can
export X displays to your heart's content without paying thousands of
dollars in bandwidth fees to money grubbing telcos, a nice GUI works
just fine. However, when you've got a server living in a datacenter
habitat that's hundreds or even thousands of miles away from you and
you're paying for every bit you transmit, you'd better be sure you're
gunna be workign on it from the command line. Any other method of
administration is simply uneconomical.
Couldn't a graphical method of executing 'rm -rf' also allow accidental
deletion? An accident is an accident, no matter what tools you use.
Mechanisms to prevent such accidents can be applied to CLI commands just
as easily as to GUIs.
The solution is to never use -f when executing rm as root. If you do,
make sure you aren't using it with -r also. Only if you have really
checked over what's going to happen (replace -i with -f first) should
you ever consider typing rm -rf as root.
I know people who alias "rm -rf" to "echo 'Don't even think about it!'"
so that if they type that, they have to explicitly unalias it to make it
work.
--jc
