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Aucbvax.4034 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Thu Sep 24 23:06:05 1981 Re: rm and shell metacharacters >From MathStat.jmrubin@Berkeley Thu Sep 24 14:03:34 1981 Two ways of making rm safer: (1) Let it become default interactive if some environmental variable is set to a non-null value. Preferably, there should be a flag to just get back to normal, and -f should turn interaction off.

(2) Move /ab/cde/file to /ab/cde/#file in lieu of re- moving it. Then, there has to be either a recursive cleanout of such files at logout, (from the home directory down) or a periodic garbage collector daemon. This system is similar to the TOPS-20 and it comes from the Rand mhmail system. The Rand mhmail programs don't take care of rm'ing # files, but, in practice, this doesn't matter too much for the mail system, because the files that get #'s are either called draft or have a numerical name, so such files don't usually proliferate. It would matter if it were done in general; I'm not sure what Rand does to prevent backup proliferation.

Joel Rubin

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