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Re: exit status of rm
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: exit status of rm |
Date: |
Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:46:24 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
address@hidden (Eric Blake) writes:
> is it worth bringing this up with the austin group?
Probably not; I doubt whether they'd change the spec.
> Is it worth changing rm to be consistent in its status regardless of
> options
No. I kind of like it the way that it is.
> Furthermore, it is always possible for forced deletes to match POSIX
> requirements by using this idiom, since the file '' does not exist:
> rm -f `generate a list` ''
I'm not sure that would work with ancient (non-Posix) Unix systems
(SunOS 4, perhaps?) where "" is an alias for ".". You might get a
diagnostic for the "". (It's hard to be sure about this nowadays.)
The usual solution is something like this:
rm -f _ `generate a list`
where _ is known to not exist (or, if it does exist, you want it to be
removed).
> Should this be mentioned in the autoconf portability documentation?
That would be nice; can you please write it up?