The safety expansion for FreeBSD rm(1)

[ttw+bsd at cobbled.net]

Daichi GOTO <daichi at freebsd.org> wrote:
[ ... ]
> Have you any dreams that rm(1) autonomously judges target should
> be remove or not?  To complexify system base command is objectionable
> behavior but adding some little and simple mechanism to prevent a
> issue is acceptable I suppose.

this is a nice little feature but from an administrative point of view
i don't think it will be used (i'm infallable, as are most admins
... at least within their own heads) and there are other more
comprehensive (i.e. not just the rm binary) tools for critical paths
(as others have pointed out).  from a user perspective it would be
nice to have '/etc/rm.conf' or something so the admin can prevent user
foot shooting, however, how many user deletes will actually be performed
by 'rm'.  basically, it's very clever, non-intrusive feature but i
just can't see any value from it.

perhaps if, instead of overlapping the current flags function, you
used this feature to allow the user to be prompted when deleting a
'uunlink' file, or so that a user may set places where 'rm' will
effectively ignore the 'uunlink' flag.  still not sure how much value
but it may encourage the use of 'uunlink' so that more paths are
protected (i.e. if more binaries are flags aware we don't need to
constantly change flags to perform functions).  one obstacle i can
think of is that many files may be stored on filesystems incompatible
with flags.