Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rochester!rutgers!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU From: bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: stupidity in directory management? Message-ID: <8414@brl-adm.ARPA> Date: Wed, 22-Jul-87 16:12:26 EDT Article-I.D.: brl-adm.8414 Posted: Wed Jul 22 16:12:26 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 24-Jul-87 06:11:39 EDT Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA Lines: 39 Yes, I don't think anything that's a hack (eg. scrounging around for the blocks) is at all acceptable (except perhaps as an emergency utility for sysmanglers, in a similar spirit to clri, even that is of almost no utility unless the system is halted the moment a file is accidently deleted, it borders on institutionalized lunacy for a time-sharing system [eg. how many files will be lost when you halt?].) It really has to be something like mark the file name so it becomes invisible on 'rm' and unmark it on 'unrm', the "file" (ie. inode and blocks) is really, really still there, it's just the name which has become invisible (oops, invisible files is a whole different but related topic :-) as far as the user is concerned. It shouldn't even be wholly invisible, I would certainly want to be able to ask 'ls' to list all undelete-able file names. Sometimes it takes some user interface magic to make this correctly accepted in the user's mind (oh, like the 'ls -D' command refusing to list anything but undelete-able files, clearly segmenting them visually.) There's really a lot of thought that's needed. Here's another...do you back up deleted files? But what if the system goes down just as they were about to legally undelete and you would have had it on the backup that finished ten minutes ago? Assume your goal in life is not to save mag tape or punish users for their foibles but to provide a reliable system. In fact, even in a "real" implementation your point still stands. People do expect that the ability to undelete means whatever is most convenient for them no matter what you tell them (I ran the TWENEX system here.) They'll delete and delete, discover they're over file quota limit because of the deleted file space, expunge to free the space, work some more, then try to undelete. If you're *lucky* they'll admit they expunged, most will stand there dumbly on the assumption that if you think the system did it to them you'll work a little harder to get them their file back (unfortunately that's often true, we're only human also.) -B