GNU bug report logs - #12400
rmdir: add --one-file-system option

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From: "Alan Curry" <pacman-cu <at> kosh.dhis.org>
To: coreutils <at> tlinx.org (Linda Walsh)
Cc: 12400 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Subject: bug#12400: rmdir runs "amok",
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 01:05:52 -0500 (GMT+5)

Linda Walsh writes:
> 
> rm ** removes all the files under a dir, and rmdir ** removes all the empty 
> directories
> under a dir.  It was the natural progression of avoiding a crippled feature in rm...
> 

For someone who claims to have been unix for so long that you consider 4.3BSD
a recent deviation from the norm, you are awfully clueless about how
everything works. Or pretending to be so as a way of escalating the drama.

And the problem you won't quit bugging everyone about is hardly a problem
anyway; how often does the "remove everything under this directory, but not
crossing mount points, and not removing this directory itself" operation
actually prove necessary?

What you're doing is *weird* and there's no reason to *expect* it to be a
less-than-10-character command. It's still a one-liner with find, as you've
already been shown.

Unix deliberately presents a single unified filesystem namespace in which
mount points look like normal directories. Recursion that traverses all
directories except mount points is *weird*.

And mounting something under /tmp that isn't logically part of /tmp (and
subject to the same cleanup policy) is *very weird*.

Please stop filing bug reports resulting from your own weirdness.

-- 
Alan Curry

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