Re: [coreutils] A more forgiving rm.

[Dan Hipschman]

Hi,

I forked off my own copy of rm to play with and have added the
following functionality.

1. If the --warnings (-w) option is given, read the file
~/.rmfd/warn.list if it exists.  The format is one absolute path per
line.  Before any files are removed, see if any file in the list would
be removed by the invocation, and if so, warn and prompt the user for
each file found whether it is OK to continue.  Note that this
overrides --force.  If the user declines, exit with status
EXIT_FAILURE.  If the user allows it, continue with the usual
semantics.  Note that rm also checks as it is removing files, so if it
finds a file that is in the list that wasn't warned about during the
initial check, it will still prompt, but the "abort the entire
operation" semantics can't be carried out.

2. If a symlink is found in warn.list, also add the target file (if it
exists) to the list.  Symlinks that aren't in the list explicitly are
generally OK to remove without warning except in the case we are given
--recursive and the symlink points to a directory that's in the list.

3. Upon start up, check the parent directory of each program argument.
If the parent directory is in warn.list we open the directory and
check if every non-dot file in the directory is in the argument list.
In that case we warn and prompt that "*" is being removed in a
directory in warn.list.  Of course, this isn't a guaranteed accurate
test, it's a best-effort attempt.

4. Add color to the warning prompt when stderr is a tty.

I realize the initial code I posted was very basic, so I wanted to
take the time to post a more complete implementation.

The code is hosted at <http://github.com/d5h/rmfd> (the repo can be
cloned via <address@hidden:d5h/rmfd.git>).  The master branch only
contains infrastructure changes dealing with forking Coreutils.  The
rmfd branch contains the code implementing the above-noted
functionality (with tests).  I made it easy to check the patches
without downloading the code by uploading the master..rmfd patches to
<http://linux.ucla.edu/~dsh/rmfd-patches/>.  I also noted the "code"
patches (not dealing with distribution, etc.) with "IMPORTANT" so you
can quickly skip the others without loss of understanding.

I would appreciate feedback on the concept or the code.  I am still
interested in hearing if this could be considered as an extension to
GNU rm on the grounds that the extra code is not substantial
(Coreutils' rm stripped is 47K on my system and rmfd's rm is 50K) and
the performance hit and POSIX noncompliance is entirely opt-in.

Thanks for your time.
Dan Hipschman