CompuServe Messages

My point was to point out a drawback to the traditional unix way of doing things, not to discuss whether or not rm * should be allowed without confirming. There are other examples where shell expansion falls short in functionality. Also, it is not enough for rm to simply count the number of arguments and compare it to the number of names in the directory, rm will have to search the directory and compare names on a one by one basis, which is surely a lot of overhead, since the shell already did that to generate the file list. sdb