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From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | bug#45700: rm should not prompt if ! isatty(2) |
Date: | Wed, 6 Jan 2021 11:16:57 -0800 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.5.0 |
On 1/6/21 10:56 AM, John Wiersba via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
$ touch asdf && chmod a-w asdf && rm asdf 2>&1 | catrm: remove write-protected regular empty file 'asdf'? # should*not* prompt If the prompt cannot be seen, then it can't be properly answered, so there is no point in prompting and consequently leaving the user with a hanging command and no way to know what's being expected of them. Instead rm should attempt to remove the file and succeed or fail based on the result.
POSIX requires the current behavior; see clause 3 in: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/rm.htmlAlthough GNU rm needn't follow POSIX blindly, it's doubtful that rm should remove the file in this particular case, as the longstanding tradition is that plain "rm" does not remove unwriteable files without more confirmation.
Since you know about "rm -f" I suggest using that (that's what everyone else does...).
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