Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!intelca!mipos3!omepd!merlyn
From: merlyn@intelob.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: cleaning a directory (was Re: Computational complexity of rm & ls)
Summary: trying another tactic
Message-ID: <4218@omepd.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 89 20:36:27 GMT
References: <9000012@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <4461@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1541@zen.UUCP> <871@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@omepd.UUCP
Reply-To: merlyn@intelob.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via BiiN, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
Lines: 30
In-reply-to: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)

In article <871@Portia.Stanford.EDU>, karish@forel (Chuck Karish) writes:
| Great, another feature!  How about using an alias instead:
| 
| 	alias rmall 'ls -f | xargs rm -f'
| 
| This avoids the overhead of sorting the names in the directory.
| It also suppresses those annoying queries from rm.

If the intent was to clean out a directory (and the directory itself
can be sacrificed and recreated), why not let 'rm' locate the files
itself, as in:

   $deadmeat=`pwd`
   cd /
   rm -rf $deadmeat
   mkdir $deadmeat
   chmod $someprotection $deadmeat

No big deal.  No passing of arguments to rm, and no need to worry
about .* files and files containing spaces and returns (yup, it's
pathological, but I worry sometimes...).

A certified UN*X Guru (Guru card #777)...
-- 
Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095
on contract to BiiN (for now :-), Hillsboro, Oregon, USA.
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