Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!joyce!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: fixing rm * (was: Worm/Passwords)
Message-ID: <717@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 20 Nov 88 21:12:26 GMT
References: <1812@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 20

In article <1812@ndsuvax.UUCP> ncgus@ndsuvax.UUCP (jim gustafson) writes:
>Maybe I missed something, but doesn't everybody have 'rm' re-defined as
>an alias or $HOME/bin/rm?

I do hope not.  It is a bad idea to define aliases for the standard
commands (and if you are a system administrator, giving new users 
profiles with such redefinitions in them is _extremely_ bad manners).
For example, I very much like the "-F" option in ls, but it would be
incredibly stupid to "alias ls 'ls -F'".  Instead I "alias lf 'ls -AF'"
and use "lf".  Just so, if you don't like what rm does, _leave_it_alone_
and define yourself an alias, script, C program, or whatever, called
"del", "delete", "delf", or whatever takes your fancy, and use that.

Apart from the obvious problem of changing something so that it no longer
does what the manual says it does, there are other reasons for not relying
on aliases for standard commands.  For example, we have several different
systems on our net here, running several varieties of UNIX.  Some of them
have the C shell, some don't.  Some of them I have my own accounts on,
some of them I share a "porting" account.  If I rely on an alias for rm
to protect me, the next time I log into a new box I will be _sunk_.