Re: Observations: rm--help:Deleting bulk files using rm

[Philip Rowlands]

On Tue, 22 May 2007, The Wanderer wrote:

> This does not, however, appear to answer his question as I parse it - 
> in paraphrase, "why does the --help output not provide this kind of 
> information?".

Because the effect is not limited to rm, so "caveat regarding shell 
limitations" or something less wordy could arguably be added to the 
35-ish coreutils which take a list of files.

Ditto for "files which begin with a dash", "dotfiles not matched by *", 
and any other getopt or shell issue which applies to any app which 
understands lists of files in argv[].

> The answer as I understand it would be something along the lines of 
> "because find is orthogonal to rm and the output of a given program's 
> --help should be concerned only with that program", and indeed there 
> may be no better answer available.

I agree with this viewpoint. (Remember that the original poster's error 
message was printed by bash, not rm.)


Cheers,
Phil