[ILUG] replacing the rm binary :-)

[John Madden]

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On (01/09/10 20:39), Lisa Muir said:
> I've been thinking about it, and wondering if it would be an idea to
> replace rm with a script based on mv to make it easier to recover from
> incidents like this. It gets complex when you consider the various
> commandline switches and then handling multiple files of the same name
> in wherever you move the files, missing folder context. Was thinking
> of moving files to a zapme folder in some location with a cron script
> to actually delete files or folders in zapme folders which are older
> than 1 week old.
> 
I read somewhere recently that doing this is a bad idea, on the
individual level at least - maybe not so for companies.

Basically, 'rm' is 'rm' everywhere. If you replace it with a protective
wrapper on a system, then people using that system get used to the
protection, and no longer think of 'rm' as 'to all intents and purposes,
that file is now gone'. They eventually rely on the protection, so when
they move systems, and the same wrapper isn't in place, they get hit
hard (probably multiple times) before reverting their behaviour.

On the company level, this could hit you if you upgrade to a new system,
or if some overzealous package management system decides to overwrite
your wrapper with the original 'rm' again!

The best "workaround" I saw was to alias 'rm' to 'rm -i'. At least this
is portable and easy to set up.

- -- 
John Madden -- john at jmadden.eu
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