fixing rm * (was: Worm/Passwords)

[John Chambers]

> >Or you could do what Sun are starting to do in SunOS 4.0, and give people
> >mouse-oriented tools for deleting files &c.  Giving people an easy way of
> >deleting files by clicking on an icon makes thing safer for them without
> >taking anything at all away.  Emacs "DIRED" mode is the same kind of
> >safety-through-convenience approach.
> 
> Coming closer! That's my idea of a user-friendly interface. An "undo"
> operation should be an essential part of the user interface... but that
> will remain utopical for most UNIX systems for the time being, I am afraid.
> (why not use a LISP machine :-) ).
> 
Oh, I don't know about that; I recall 'way back when I first stumbled across
Unix, after having worked on N other commercial systems.  When I found that
the rm command just did what I told it and didn't complain, my reaction was
"Wow, this is really a nice, friendly system!"  But in the years since then,
Unix has gotten less and less friendly to me, because people think I'm too
stupid to think before hitting <RETURN>, and they add "features" such as
checks to rm.  So now I find myself doing things like:
	rm aud/*
	^C
	rm -f aud/*
while thinking many unprintable thoughts about the @#$^% idiots who would
do such a thing and cause me to waste my time with such silliness.

The real solution is:  People who can't handle commands like rm shouldn't
have /bin in their search path.  Even better, vendors should supply them
with tools like mice and menus, and not bother holding the hands of those
users that like simple, direct, powerful tools.

Unix has a perfectly good mechanism for providing different users with
different interfaces.  Why not use it?

[No, I've never typed "rm * .o", or at least I've never hit <RETURN> after
such a typo.  My right little finger tends to delay automatically when it
knows I've typed a possibly dangerous command, to give my brain time to
think about it.]

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)

[Any errors in the above are due to failures in the logic of the keyboard,
not in the fingers that did the typing.]