Worth while bash hack (makes history even more valuable)

[Kevin Brown]

Since RH is good for newbies to cut their teeth on and rm -i is only an alias 
when running as root, I think it is a good idea.  I can do rm as a normal user 
and it doesn't ask, but do it as root and the system makes sure that is what I 
want to do.  If you want it to stop asking, just rm -f as root.

>   >> ... I teach them about the alias so they know what
>   >> is going on. If they man rmi or cpi they will not
>   >> find it so that is a much worse idea then just a
>   >> bit of explanation.
> 
>   der> "rm *" in a directory and expecting to be able
>   der> to say yes or no to every file will not work.
>   der> "ksh: rmi: command not found" is easier to deal
>   der> with than lost data.
> 
> I'm with Hans on this one. In 19 years of using Unix, I
> could probably count on one hand the number of times
> I've used the -i flag to rm. Or maybe on two hands.
> 
> The correct behavior of rm is not to ask the user for
> confirmation. That's what they should learn, and also
> how to deal with it. 
> 
> It infuriates me when someone changes the defaults for
> me. I remember when I first started using Red Hat it
> frustrated me that no matter what I did it would ask me
> for confirmation. It was so far beyond my ability to
> comprehend that someone would have the audacity to
> change the behavior of a Unix command that had worked
> fine the way it is since 1969 that it didn't occur to
> me until sometime later that RH had aliased it. A big
> fat boo to them for doing that.
> 
> Users who want that sort of behavior are entitled to
> create it themselves.
> 
> Somehow it reminds me of when I drove a U-Haul from the
> coast of Maine to Arizona in 1978. The truck had a
> governor on it that prevented me from going faster than
> 40 miles an hour with the pedal to the metal, maybe 45
> if I was going downhill. Presumably someone at U-Haul
> thought they were doing customers a safety favor by
> forcing them to drive 15 miles under the speed limit
> all the way across the country.
>