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

[Pádraig Brady]

On 11/06/18 12:18, Kaz Kylheku (Coreutils) wrote:
> 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.

Yes this is a good point (pardon the pun).
I'm currently going with:

   $ rm -r --preserve-root=all /dev/shm
   rm: skipping '/dev/shm', since a file system is mounted there
   rm: and --preserve-root=all is in effect

thanks,
Pádraig