Hi,
In message 47B37791.3010109@freescale.com you wrote:
Oops??? "rm" never asks unless you ask it to ask.
Not true. It will ask if you don't have write permission to the file, even if you are able to delete because you have write permission to the directory.
Does it? Indeed. Must be a GNUism. I bet this was't there in Unix v6 when I learned it ;-)
You are right, but this is still a special case where another, explicit protection is being overwritten.
* mkfs.ext2 on a file, needs -F package managers with unfulfilled * dependencies always ask and need a "--force-xxx" to go ahead whatsoever. * bzip2, bunzip2, bzcat, gzip, gzcat, gunzip -f to overwrite files * git-checkout-index needs -f to overwrite files * git-push needs -f to push non-linear head * git-fetch needs -f in same situtation * rsync -force to force deletion of dirs even if not empty ....
I'll stop here. It seems the unix commandline tilted to a behaviour where interactive commands tend to ask in dangerous situations but scripts can explicitely override it - which is definitely what I prefer.
Cheers Detlev