Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!tektronix!tekcrl!terryl
From: terryl@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM (Terry Laskodi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Computational complexity of rm & ls
Message-ID: <3694@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 14 Mar 89 10:12:06 GMT
References: <9000012@m.cs.uiuc.edu+ <4461@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1541@zen.UUCP>
Reply-To: terryl@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 19

In article <1541@zen.UUCP+ frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales) writes:
+In article <4461@pt.cs.cmu.edu> marcoz@MARCOZ.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU (Marco Zagha) writes:
+>In article <9000012@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, wsmith@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
+>> [...]   "rm *" seems to be a common
+>> enough idiom that rm could be optimized to handle that case better.
+>
+>Don't forget that the shell expands the "*", not rm.  All rm sees
+>is a huge argv with one name for every file (except .* files).
+
+This was my first thought upon reading what Bill posted, and then I thought:
+"maybe he means the act of deleting all the files in a directory is a
+common one, and should be handled specially."  Certainly, rm never sees
+the '*', only the results of its (sorted, hidden-file-less) expansion.
+
+Maybe adding a '-A' (for All, harder to type than '-a') option to rm would
+be justified.  No doubt doing so would break jillions of scripts.  :-)

     There already is an option like that; try "rm -r <directory-name>"
(and, yes I know "*" won't match . files....).