Accessing files by inode #s

Guy Harris guy at gorodish.Sun.COM
Sun Feb 7 19:19:41 AEST 1988


> "rm -i *" won't work unless you have a shell that doesn't strip off the 8th
> bit.  "rm -i ."  should work, because it will try to remove all the files in
> the current directory before removing the current directory.

Well, err, umm, "rm -i ."  won't work either, twit.  (OK, let's see how many
people flame me for insulting the previous poster without first checking to see
who the poster I'm insulting is; it's happened before....)  "rm -ri ."  will,
however, at least on some systems; you need the "-r" flag to tell it to remove
everything *in* "." as well as removing "." itself.  On other systems, it will
refuse to remove "."; the 4.[23]BSD "rm" does so, but in 4.[23]BSD the kernel
refuses to allow file names to contain characters with the 8th bit set.  The
only system with which I'm familiar that allows such characters but has the
4.[23]BSD check also has a Bourne shell that doesn't strip off the 8th bit, so
that isn't a problem.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com



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