Agreed. Plus, it’s unmistakable that rm meant “remove” when you examine her sister
“rmdir.”
I think it’s a bit more interesting to uncover why rm does not remove directories by
default thereby obviating the need for rmdir—-especially since the potentially nightmarish
incantation of “rm -rf” does include files, folders and just about everything else in
between.
Bill Corcoran
On Apr 25, 2018, at 5:36 PM, John P. Linderman
<jpl.jpl@gmail.com<mailto:jpl.jpl@gmail.com>> wrote:
Another country heard
from.<http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue49/fischer.html> I doubt
the Robert Morris story, given that a command as fundamental as "rm" must have
come about very early in the development, and there isn't a pattern of naming
commands after their authors.
On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 1:22 PM, Eric Blood
<winkywooster@gmail.com<mailto:winkywooster@gmail.com>> wrote:
I came across this yesterday:
Fun fact: according to unsubstantiated UNIX lore,
"rm" is NOT short-hand
for "remove" but rather, it stands for the initials of the developer that
wrote
the original implementation, Robert Morris.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916565
I was curious if there's any truth to it. I found
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl and was poking around but
couldn't determine when the rm command came about.
Thoughts?
--
Eric Blood
winkywooster@gmail.com<mailto:winkywooster@gmail.com>