Re: Deprecating mv's --reply={yes,no,query} option

[Jim Meyering]

Tim Waugh <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 09:37:35AM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
>
>> address@hidden (Bob Proulx) wrote:
>> > The second option that I recommend is to deprecate this option
>> > entirely and remove it from the code base.  The longer it remains the
>> > harder it will be to change to better behavior later.  It is not
>> > really useful as it stands today.  (I am happy to see challenges to
>> > that last statement.)
>>
>> Hi Bob,
>>
>> I'm leaning toward deprecating (undocument and emit a warning)
>> --reply=ANYTHING.
>>
>> Does anyone find the --reply=no option to be useful?
>> The other two are equivalent to -i and -f.
>
> Some Linux distributions have alias rm="rm -i" for root, and the way
> to avoid the prompt then is --reply=yes.  It's useful to have an
> option that undoes the effect of '-i', IMHO.

[ Presuming you meant `mv -i'. ]
Just use mv's -f option -- it's equivalent to --reply=yes.

If you really did mean `rm -i', then I admit that rm's
-f option isn't precisely the same as `turn off -i', but
it's pretty close.  People (especially superuser) who don't like
the vendor-supplied aliases are always free to use `unalias'
or to define a new alias that invokes rm with no options.