Re: exit status of rm

[Bob Proulx]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> address@hidden (James Youngman) wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 08:45:05PM +0000, Eric Blake wrote:
> >> This puts the invocation of rm without arguments in the
> >> implementation's realm, where currently, coreutils is not consistent
> >> on what it returns:

Without belaboring consistency I believe it is doing exactly the right
thing to do.

> >> $ rm
> >> rm: missing operand
> >> Try `rm --help' for more information.
> >> $ echo $?   # used improperly
> >> 1
> >> $ rm -f
> >> $ echo $?    # all (zero) calls to unlink succeeded
> >> 0
> >
> > Personally I think this is exactly the right way to do it (both
> > cases).
> 
> Same here.
> 
> FYI, Solaris' /bin/rm is similar (though it's 2 and 0).
> On NetBSD 1.6 /bin/rm exits with status 1 in both cases.

I know that if this behavior changed it would break a lot of scripts.
It is very common to see variables in the rm -f which may not be
expanded.  It is often counted upon that rm -f without arguments will
not be an error.  This is very useful behavior.

  rm -f $TMPS  # where $TMPS might not be set

> >>Are there any systems out there where "rm -f ``" has non-zero status?

Not that I know of and that would include GNU, BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Solaris.

Bob