On Sat, 5 May 2001, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > If you need that kind of protection, > > > > alias rm='rm -i' That's what Dave said. rm doesn't need to alias to rm -i, only rm -(any flags) *. > > Yes, *nix is stupid. But it knows that and stays out of your way, which is > > better than assuming that the user is stupid too. In general, yes. There are a couple of exceptions, I'd say, this being one of them. > When I was living in Sweden, the student computer club's SunOS > machine had a MOTD that read something like: > > "Unix does not stop you from doing stupid things, because stopping you from > doing stupid things would stop you from doing clever things." > > "Microsoft Windows is pretty good at stopping you from doing stupid things." That's cute, even if the logic is a little munged up. Windows being good at stopping you from doing stupid things doesn't imply that it stops you from doing clever things -- that's a whole 'nother part of the feature set! The ideal system would not impede cleverness, but it would question (not stop) stupidity. -- "To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." --Anonymous