Talk:rm (Unix)

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Short for "remove"?

This article says differently... --WayneMokane 04:35, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That page has been {{fact}}ed; seems an unlikely etymology. æ ² ✆ 2007‑01‑30t22:01z

Nothing on the current Robert Morris article backs up the theory that rm is short for Robert Morris. rm is consistent with the many two letter command names that have been in UNIX since very near the beginning: sh, cd, cp, ln, ed, ar, as, du, cu, id, lp, nm, od, ps, pg, tr to name but a few. Simon Marchese (talk) 11:29, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have heard it from a noted security professional, that is was named after Robert Morris. The tool was a wrapper for delete, which at the time would not delete folders, nor was it recursive. The individual was told of this fact by Robert himself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.236.17.3 (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I heard this story as well from probably the same professional that you are talking about. The story sounded rather incredulous and would make for an awesome origin story, so I tried emailing the guy about it, but he never responded to me. I've been working on confirming some of these Unix legends recently and thought maybe Ken Thompson could confirm this one so I wrote to Ken last night and already received a response saying that Ken himself wrote the 'rm' command that it does mean "remove". He also said that the command was written before 'rhm' (Robert Morris) was even a Unix user. It could be that Robert Morris really dropped in on his class as the guy claimed, but it turns out that the origin story he told is not true. Deltaray3 (talk) 13:19, 5 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I heard this same story today (7 May 2017), personalized for the instructor. He retold it as his friend, John Strand (https://www.sans.org/instructors/john-strand), was teaching a basic Linux class in which Robert Morris dropped in unannounced, claiming rm is his namesake. This makes at least the second incredulous friend-of-a-friend informal copyright claim. 17:32, 7 May 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.214.105.179 (talk)

Hrmmf! soft links

Shouldn't this page mention that soft links are not followed if you select rm -r? I know it is obvious that any sensible designer would design it that way, but for the paranoid among us (and this trait has been known to exist in programmers), wouldn't it nice to give people about to type it the comfort of saying so clearly and unequivocally? <not signing because the signup doesn't allow underscores> —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.171.191.60 (talk • contribs) 00:57, 20 May 2007

This is probably implementation dependent and the man page will surely clear up any such nuances of behavior. --WayneMokane 14:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of mantanence template.

We've been working on this for a while, and would this qualify for WP:MTR? --One Blue Hat ^{❯❯❯ (talk)} 19:18, 24 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]