Re: LYNX-DEV 2-8 compiled on Irix 5.3 (was problem)

[David Combs]

> From address@hidden Mon Mar  2 00:26:58 1998
> From: Philip Webb <address@hidden>
> Subject: LYNX-DEV 2-8 compiled on Irix 5.3 (was problem)
> 
> BTW -- since i'm still a bit naive about some things --
> can i be sure that using  rm -r  ordinarily -- ie `unsafe' --
> will never remove anything ABOVE the current directory?
> this comes up eg when i want to remove the files from an old Lynx version.
> 
> -- 
> ========================,,============================================


Re "rm -r".  Or just plain rm.

EXTREMELY dangerous.

Of course you alias rm to 'rm -i'.

For large numbers of files, you cannot spend
all day answering 'y'.  So "\rm" avoids the
alias.  But dangerous again.

The real danger is that ".." is ALSO a FILE that
can get removed.  Which is matched by "*" -- or 
maybe it's ".*" that mataches it.  Anyway
I got caught once.

So what I have started to do is when I want to 
rm a lot of files, I first MOVE them somewhere
else, where it is SAFE to make a mistake.

I have a subdirectory todelete/todelete/todelete
(hey, I'm taking no chances!), I put all the filenames
I want to remove into a file, then
  mv `cat names.foo` todelete/todelete/todelete
  cd (or pushd) !$  (this is csh)
  sh   (important!  Don't want the following "rm"
         on the history list!)
  ls  (make sure!)
  du -a  (maybe also to catch subdirs)
  THEN: rm *

If you screw up and also rm the directory ABOVE
the current pwd, you are still ok.  (Whew!)

Anyway, that's my scheme.

---

My machine has two physical disks.  So more often than
with tape, I backup recent files, via cp -p, to the
other disk (ie, a fs ON the other disk), so that if
a disk crashes, I at least have the stuff since real
backup on the other disk.

Of course does not protect from fire, lightning,
theft, etc.

Hope this helps