Re: [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards?

Yes, in the initial expansion of the command line, but V6 'rm' also uses 'glob' internally; if the '-r' flag is given, and the current name in the command argument list is a directory, viz.: if ((buf->mode & 060000) == 040000) { if (rflg) { ... execl("/etc/glob", "glob", "rm", "-r", fflg? "-f": "*", fflg? "*": p, 0); printf("%s: no glob\n", arg); exit(); } (where 'p' is 0 - no idea why the writer didn't just say '"*": 0, 0'). So "rm -f foo*", where the current directory contains file 'foo0 foo1 foo2' and directoty 'foobar', and directory 'foobar' contains 'bar0 bar1 bar2', the first instance of 'glob' (run by the shell) expands the 'foo0 foo1 foo2 foobar' and the second instance (run by 'rm') expands the 'bar0 bar1 bar2'. I don't totally grok 'glob', but it is prepared to exec() either the command name, /bin/{command} or /usr/bin/{command}; but if that file is not executable it tries feeding it to the shell, on the assumption it must be a shell command list: execv(file, arg); if (errno==ENOEXEC) { arg[0] = file; *--arg = "/bin/sh"; execv(*arg, arg); } I guess (too lazy to look) that the execv() must return a different error number if the file doesn't exist at all, so it only tries the shell if the file existed, but wasn't executable. Noel