Re: helper function that should take a list argument doesn't do anything

[Janek Warchoł]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 2:49 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:
>> What really annoys me is the fact that rm has no reasonable safeguard.
>> [...] i'd like to see a safeguard against deleting too many files
>
> rm is not a file manager.  I do larger renaming/removal workloads using
> Emacs (hardly surprising), but there are also other file managers.

indeed, rm is not a file manager.  However, rm has this:

-I     prompt once before removing  more  than  three  files,

so it makes sense to me to have an option for prompting before
removing more than n files, too.

As for Emacs, i think it wouldn't make sense to write shell scripts
depending on Emacs.

>> I was thinking about having all my files in a git repository, but
>> that's ~10 GB of data, and lots of it is in a binary (i mean,
>> non-diffable) form.  Do you think it would make sense to use git for
>> that?
>
> It's pretty efficient for storing even binary blobs.

i'll try then.

> -i isn't an option of touch.  It is an option of rm.  The touch places a
> file -i in the directory.  At least with POSIX sort order, this is bound
> to come rather early in a directory listing, so if you have files a, b,
> c in the directory,
>
> rm * .o
>
> expands into
>
> rm -i a b c .o
>
> It does not help much if you have a sort order where - gets ignored,
> obviously.

ah, that's really nice!  thanks for explanation.


On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
> On my GNU/Linux box, I'm using the libtrash library which intercepts
> `rm' and friends to store data to be deleted in a trash directory.  A
> cron script then really deletes the collected data once a day.
>
>   http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/libtrash/
>
> I'm very satisfied with it.

looks interesting.  I'll give it a try - thanks for suggestion!

Janek