Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ncoast.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!harvard!wjh12!genrad!decvax!cwruecmp!atvax!ncoast!bsa From: bsa@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: Versions non-solution Message-ID: <400@ncoast.UUCP> Date: Thu, 11-Oct-84 15:38:13 EDT Article-I.D.: ncoast.400 Posted: Thu Oct 11 15:38:13 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 13-Oct-84 04:09:42 EDT References: <462@wdl1.UUCP> <> Reply-To: bsa@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery) Organization: North Coast XENIX, Cleveland Lines: 56 Summary: > Article <> From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) +--------------- | > Good grief! I thought that everyone had aliased "rm" to "mv". | | Huh?! Are we trying to solve the problem by ignoring it? | | > Try putting these lines in your .cshrc: | > | > # safe rm. moves things to /tmp, where the system can garbage collect | > alias rm 'mv \!* /tmp/wunder' | > | > You are free to use your own login name instead of mine for your... | | This doesn't work well in the face of system crashes if your system works | as ours does, in two respects: | | We don't have a lot of space in /tmp. Making everyone else's | compilations (etc., etc.) bomb out so that you can have your own | personal file wastebasket overflowing is not kindly regarded around | here. | | We clean out /tmp on rebooting (as happens after a crash), so if | the files you want to hang on to happen to be needed because of a | crash while you were doing something, they'll all get blown away at | the worst time. | | And, of course, there's the oops-I'm-in-the-wrong-directory routine--you go | to clean up /tmp/myself only you space out the cd or some such and end up | cleaning out your work directory. For most of the clever backup schemes, | there's a standard screwup that will zorch them. In the end, there's no | substitute for plain old common stupidity...er, I mean... Hmmm, 'alias rm rm -i; alias remove /bin/rm' is 9/10 of the problem. Of course, you can still foul it up... and since I also sometimes mess up a file in the editor, I have a vi front-end to create .B:files in the directory where the file I'm editing is. Only one backup is kept per file. And it's relatively difficult to delete .B:* without knowing you've fouled up (rm .* will yell about removing .. and . long before it gets that far). The /tmp soulution is out; until just recently, we had the following disk space allocation: /dev/root - 12M (also /tmp and /dev/swap) /dev/hd1 - 8M /dev/fd0 - 1.2M /dev/fd1 - 1.2M -the latter being floppies that might not be mounted or might be only single-sided for .6M. There was barely enough room for my .B:file backups, much less /tmp/bsa. On the system I describe above (at work), I use both schemes. On the system I'm writing from (hobby system, tdi1 isn't on the net) I only use the rm alias. I lose too much with the other -- it isn't smart enough to allow 'vi +5 file' or such -- maybe I'll hack a copy of vistart as provided in net.sources a while back. --bsa