From: utzoo!decvax!microsof!uw-beave!black
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: Microsoft"s answer to dot files
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.137
Posted: Sun Oct 24 14:16:40 1982
Received: Mon Oct 25 01:56:53 1982
References: tpdcvax.183

Here is a point in favour of considering shells to be filters, and thus
not able to accept defaults. 

Having deleted all the (non-dot) files in a directory by typing rm  dirname *
instead of rm dirname/*, I created my own version of rm and put it in my path.
It asks me if I really meant that when I try do delete more than one file.
This is fine when the shell is interactive.

However, lots of system commands, e.g. "where", seem to use rm instead of
/bin/rm, with the result that they either ask me if I really want to delete
all the tmp files they just created, or that they don't work at all.

My solution?  Shells should be customizable ONLY when interactive, and not
when used as filters.