Re: currently doable? Indirect notation used w/a hash

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Mon, 10 Jun 2013, Linda Walsh wrote:

> >   Point taken, but the only way such a string would be passed as a
> >   variable name is if it was given as user input -- which would,
> >   presumably, be sanitized before being used. Programming it literally
> >   makes as much sense as 'rm -rf /'.
> ---
>         That still didn't POSIX-Gnu rm from disabling that ability.

   Did they? I'm not going to test it :(

>         Though the one that really causes a pain is them removing
> the ability to safely delete all files in a directory with the 'rm' command.

  Since when?

>         Now, many contortions are necessary.
>
>         (i.e.:   "cd testing/output/ && rm --one-file-system  -fr ."
> used to safely deleted everything in output -- except the "." --
> but it was 'last' (recursive 'rm' has to be depth first), and
> the -f would suppress the error you got about not being able to remove ".".

   Contortions???

> Now they put in a special check to check the starting arguments first,
> before doing the depth-first remove and abort any processing for files
> in "."   You need  to use 'find' with alot more typing to do something 
> similar.

  What's wrong with:

rm -rf *

--
   Chris F.A. Johnson, <http://cfajohnson.com/>
   Author:
   Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell (2009, Apress)
   Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)