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From: andy@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng,comp.unix.xenix,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Request for human interface design anecdotes
Message-ID: <763@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Mon, 16-Nov-87 19:02:24 EST
Article-I.D.: rocky.763
Posted: Mon Nov 16 19:02:24 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Nov-87 03:41:50 EST
References: <1721@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> <1621@megatest.UUCP> <101@ateng.UUCP> <1402@cuuxb.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: andy@rocky.UUCP (Andy Freeman)
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 31
Xref: mnetor comp.cog-eng:293 comp.unix.xenix:1160 comp.unix.wizards:5489

In article <1402@cuuxb.ATT.COM> dlm@cuuxb.UUCP (Dennis L. Mumaugh) writes:
[We're talking about "rm *".  Guess why I have a csh alias for rm that
 always asks about every file.  When I'm absolutely sure that I want to
 delete a number of files and I don't want to answer questions, I pipe
 the whole command off to sh.]

>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.

There are far more general solutions.  Most people have trash cans.
One can recover their contents for some time, but they go away at
well defined times.  Too bad unix doesn't handle generations in
the file system (rcs and friends are clever archivers - they are
still useful in this context).  Obsolete versions can be marked
"deleted" so they aren't normally visible, but they can be retrieved.
Then it makes sense to have a file deleter that tells you what it
has done, just to reduce the chance of surprise.  (Yes, there should
be bozo mode for people who don't want to know or for programs that
think they know what they are doing.)

One should never simplify more than necessary.

-andy
-- 
Andy Freeman
UUCP:  {arpa gateways, decwrl, sun, hplabs, rutgers}!sushi.stanford.edu!andy
ARPA:  andy@sushi.stanford.edu
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