svn commit: r272372 - stable/10/bin/rm

[Bruce Evans]

On Sat, 4 Oct 2014, Bruce Evans wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Oct 2014, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> 	… as filtering out these errors would handle the case that -f should 
>> handle according to the manpage:
>> 
>>     -f      Attempt to remove the files without prompting for confirmation,
>>             regardless of the file's permissions.  If the file does not
>>             exist, do not display a diagnostic message or modify the exit
>>             status to reflect an error.  The -f option overrides any 
>> previous
>>             -i options.
>
> I didn't realize theat the man page was that broken.  It doesn't even mention
> the main effect of -f -- to ignore errors for nonexistent files.  This is
> discussed in the COMPATIBILITY section, with quite bad wording:

Oops, I missed the second sentence in the above.

> % COMPATIBILITY
> %      The rm utility differs from historical implementations in that the -f
> %      option only masks attempts to remove non-existent files instead of 
> mask-
> %      ing a large variety of errors.  The -v option is non-standard and its 
> use
> %      in scripts is not recommended.
>
> "masks attempts to remove" is strange wording.  rm doesn't attempt to
> remove nonexistent files; it attempts to remove existent files ...
>
> The code doesn't do anything like that.  It is close to POSIX, and just
> tries to remove existent files and then ignores the ENOENT error for
> nonexistent files iff -f.

I misread this too.  There are only minor wording problems.

Bruce