On Sat, 5 May 2001, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:

> > If you need that kind of protection,
> > 
> > alias rm='rm -i'

That's what Dave said.  rm doesn't need to alias to rm -i, only 
rm -(any flags) *.

> > Yes, *nix is stupid.  But it knows that and stays out of your way, which is
> > better than assuming that the user is stupid too.

In general, yes.  There are a couple of exceptions, I'd say, this being
one of them.

> 	When I was living in Sweden, the student computer club's SunOS
> machine had a MOTD that read something like:
> 
> "Unix does not stop you from doing stupid things, because stopping you from
> doing stupid things would stop you from doing clever things."
> 
> "Microsoft Windows is pretty good at stopping you from doing stupid things."

That's cute, even if the logic is a little munged up.  Windows being good
at stopping you from doing stupid things doesn't imply that it stops you
from doing clever things -- that's a whole 'nother part of the feature
set!

The ideal system would not impede cleverness, but it would question (not
stop) stupidity.

-- 
"To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." --Anonymous