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From: dlm@cuuxb.ATT.COM (Dennis L. Mumaugh)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng,comp.unix.xenix,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Request for human interface design anecdotes
Message-ID: <1402@cuuxb.ATT.COM>
Date: Fri, 13-Nov-87 13:39:16 EST
Article-I.D.: cuuxb.1402
Posted: Fri Nov 13 13:39:16 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Nov-87 05:00:38 EST
References: <1721@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> <1621@megatest.UUCP> <101@ateng.UUCP>
Reply-To: dlm@cuuxb.UUCP (Dennis L. Mumaugh)
Organization: ATT Data Systems Divison, Lisle, Ill.
Lines: 29
Xref: mnetor comp.cog-eng:288 comp.unix.xenix:1149 comp.unix.wizards:5475

This  request  has  spawned  many  stories  involving  rm  *  (or
variants)  that were not intentional.  When we first started with
unix four people managed to destroy things within  the  same  day
that  way.  In my case, I had worked all night to build a new and
wondrous piece of software.  It all worked, etc.  So I was  doing
the  final  clean  up:  I  typed rm *.c instead of rm *.o and the
whole project went down the drain!

Shortly thereafter we made a change to the  shell:  in  the  code
that did global expansions (*,?) we set a flag and if the command
name was "rm* or del*" we  said  confirm:  and  printed  out  the
expanded list of files.

Even with this aid we still had people screw up but not nearly as
often.

Then there was the time we did rm -rf ../*

The moral of this is that the command  interpreters  need  to  be
modified to request confirmation of potentially fatal things such
as rm * and it must be in the command interpreter as the  command
itself  can't  know  whether  the  list  is an expanded list or a
individually entered list.

After that is fixed we can talk  about  Jim  Gillogly's  spelling
corrector shell.
-- 
=Dennis L. Mumaugh
 Lisle, IL       ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,lll-crg}!cuuxb!dlm