Re: shell-mode flakey

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Roland Winkler <Roland.Winkler@physik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
>
> Somewhat off-topic: I once discussed the following on
> bug-coreutils@gnu.org.
>
> I have
>
>   alias rm='rm --interactive'
>
> But what I really would like was an interactive query that was
> restricted to those cases when I have typed something on the command
> line that doesn't tell me what rm will really do. Usually, this is
> the case when the shell did some filename expansion. Unfortunately,
> to the best of my knowledge it is not possible for a command like rm
> to figure out whether the command shell performed some kind of
> filename expansion or not.

Yeah, this is the reason why tcsh implements this in the shell rather than
in rm.  set rmstar in tcsh will cause tcsh to warn about the command rm
with an argument of * before it expands the wildcard, which is far more
useful than rm -i because it only prompts for an infrequent operation.  I
wish bash had that feature; it's one of the main things left that tcsh
will do that bash won't (so far as I know).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>