Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Delete vs. rm
Message-ID: <2903@enea.se>
Date: 23 Mar 88 13:02:11 GMT
References: <36568QAA@PSUVM> <2413@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog)
Followup-To: comp.os.vms
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 51


It's funny. First someone posts an article "VMS is bad". Some people,  
like me, feel obliged to reply: "it's not bad, but Unix is." And so 
you get a war going. Some people are annoyed of getting these articles,
so in their turn they everyone's mailboxes with "Stop the war!", instead
of just letting it die by itself. I'm just waiting to see those "Stop 
'Stop the war!' now!"....

Anyway, the rest of this article is a minor quibble about the delete 
commands on the systems. You may prefer not to read it.

Hey, didn't I warn you?????

Rahul Dhesi (dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP) writes:
>In article <36568QAA@PSUVM> QAA@PSUVM.BITNET writes:
>>To all UNIX lovers - give me ONE good reason why "rm" is better than "delete"
>>to delete a file.
>
>The VMS "delete" command has some serious flaws.  It can't recursively
>delete a directory subtree.  It will also blindly delete a file even if
>it has multiple directory entries for it, thus invalidating them with
>no warning to the user.  (This is really a VMS file system problem.)
>Also, "delete" simply aborts with an error if the file that the user
>wanted to delete is write-protected, instead of allowing the user to
>override the protection as the UNIX "rm" command does.
>
>While VMS does have some interesting and useful features, its "delete"
>command is surely not one of its strong points.

The Unix command "rm" has some flaws to. Since ages I have the symbol
Del*ete == "Delete/confirm". With the alias "rm -i" I get the same
under Unix. The problem comes when I want to entirely want to delete
a group of files. In VMS I just answer "a" to the question. "rm" doesn't 
know of this. 
  "rm" doesn't know of /LOG, nice to have in command procedures, but also 
when you are cleaning away lots of blocks, and you want to feel proud 
on how much you remove. 
  "rm" cannot delete files created before a certain date, or that belongs 
to a certain user. 
  "rm" does, as far I know, just unlink the file, there is no /ERASE option 
with which you can clean the disk space. 
  With "rm" you can accidently remove a file which you decided to keep, and 
therefore have set the protection accordingly.

Most of the deficiencies pointed by me and Rahul are fairly to circumvent
by applying the command interpreter in question.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog       
ENEA Data, Stockholm        
sommar@enea.UUCP           "Si tu crois l'amour tabou...
                            Regarde bien, les yeux d'un fou!!!" -- Ange