I like my machine, whatever it may be, to do what I tell it to.  No more, no less.  Windows and some desktop environments barrage you with a medley of “Are you sure?” dialog boxes whenever you perform the slightest operation.  Files are sent to the politically correct Recycle Bin when you request them to be deleted, as another example.  That’s one of the annoyances people accept about using a computer, and they’ll blindly click any confirmation dialog that comes their way.  It’s one of the things that drives me batty when I have to use a system like that.  Sure, that can be bypassed, but that’s another step in what should be a brisk, easy operation.  Nautilus and other GUIs on Linux do the same, but then again, I don’t use them either.

What’s this have to do with anything?  I ran across the whining of the user responsible for yet another bastardization of the *nix philosphy in Ubuntu. One day, he found out that rm -rf / actually does what it says on the tin.  Imagine that.  The most infamous command in Unixland might actually be infamous for a reason.

But, his whining wasn’t just confined to his blog.  Being the sensitive and prudent user he is, he posted a bug report to Launchpad, and succeeded in having the coreutils package modified to “fix” this behavior.  Nevermind the countless other methods of hosing a system, like careless use of dd and other such block device utilities.  Nevermind that similar invocations of rm -rf will result in equally disastrous results (see: rm -rf /*, rm -rf ~, etc).  Nevermind the expectation of a system doing what the user tells it to.  Damn the torpedoes.

At least one brother in arms spoke up against the inane change:

Preach on, brotha man!

Life is full of dangerous choices.  Using rm is one of them, or at least it should be.  It’s the price you pay to learn to be careful.  It’s the cost of being in control of your system.  Dammit, that’s the way I like it.

As a footnote, Sun also took this approach with Solaris 10.  Damn.