command line options

Leslie Mikesell les at chinet.UUCP
Sun Apr 10 13:44:00 AEST 1988


In article <864 at cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>In article <48917 at sun.uucp>, guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>> > You miss the point; -? already has the desired property; it does not
>a time-honoured hack for protecting important directories, some people
>create an empty file called "-i", so that an
>	rm *
>command will turn into
>	rm -i {everything else}
>So files matching "-?" are quite likely to exist.


If a person knows enough about shell behaviour to create such a hack
he should also know enough to quote the "-?" to prevent expansion.

On the other hand, I would be more sympathetic toward a novice that
accidentally managed to create a file named -? and wondered why the
* no longer worked at all.
  Les Mikesell



More information about the Comp.unix.wizards mailing list