Re: rm -rf behaviour (7.1)

[Jim Meyering]

Mark Rosenstand wrote:
> Hi Jim and the list,
>
> I just downloaded and extracted a tarball with restrictive permissions.
> Trying to rm -rf'ing the directory goes
>
> rm: cannot remove `SQUIRREL2': Permission denied
>
> After recursively chmod'ing it to 700, rm succeeds.
>
> The tarball in question can be found at
> http://dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/squirrel/squirrel_2.2.2_stable.tar.gz
>
> Is this behaviour intentional?

Yes.  rm -rf is required to act that way.  I.e.,
rm -rf must fail to remove a non-empty directory that is not writable.

For example,

    $ mkdir -p d/d; chmod u-w d; rm -rf d
    rm: cannot remove directory `d/d': Permission denied