Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!pdb
From: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Barron)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Worm/Passwords
Message-ID: <2982@ci.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 17 Nov 88 18:58:33 GMT
References: <22401@cornell.UUCP> <4627@rayssd.ray.com> <8563@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> <125@embossed.UUCP> <672@quintus.UUCP> <466@yarra.oz.au>
Reply-To: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Barron)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 13

In article <466@yarra.oz.au> cm@yarra.oz.au (Charles Meo) writes:
>Why not put something in rm to check for the '*' token by itself and say
>something like:
>
>Are you sure y/n?

The 'rm' command never sees the '*', since wildcard expansion is done by
the shell.  For instance, if your current directory contains "this_file",
"that_file", and "other_file", and you type "rm *", what the 'rm' command
actually sees is "rm other_file that_file this_file".  That is, it doesn't
know a wildcard was used.

--Pat.