Re: RFC: rm --preserve-root=all to protect mount points

[Kaz Kylheku (Coreutils)]

On 2018-06-10 23:14, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> I was asked off list to consider adding an option to rm
> that could be enabled with an alias, and would protect
> mount points specified on the command line.
[...]
>   $ rm -r --preserve-root=all /dev/shm
>   rm: skipping '/dev/shm', since it's a mount point
>   rm: and --preserve-root=all is in effect

The command option is well-named, but consider changing
"mount point" to "mount" in this diagnostic and, more
importantly, any documentation which refers to this.

E.g. "since a filesystem is mounted there",
"since it is a filesystem root", etc.

I think the "mount point" terminology is misleading because
one important sense of the word is that it refers to the
Unix kludge of requiring an empty directory to exist for
a mount. The empty directory where one intends to mount a
filesystem is the "mount point" for it.

This option cannot protect directories which are mount
points in that sense; only ones that are carrying mounts.