Re: "rm" bug

[James Youngman]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 02:17:10PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:

> The latter, but this comes up so often (I must have seen this reported
> a hundred times...) that I thought I'd try to improve the diagnostic.
> I installed this:
> 
> 2005-08-29  Paul Eggert  <address@hidden>
> 
>       * NEWS: "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO"
>       exists and "-FOO" is not a valid option.
>       * src/rm.c: Include lstat.h, quotearg.h.
>       (diagnose_leading_hyphen): New function.
>       (main): Use it.

Good plan.  While I think about it, it might also be worth enhancing
the --help output to point out that "rm ./*" is safe while "rm *"
might do things you did not expect (think "touch ./-rf").

I attach a patch (with ChangeLog entry) which includes such a change
to the help message.  I have snail-mailed a completed copyright
assignment for coreutils, but it hasn't turned up in copyright.list
yet (in any case this particular change is tiny).

Regards,
James.

rm-help-dotstar-suggestion.patch
Description: Text document