Curious Sunday Morning Linux File System Question ??

[William Case]

Thanks Charles;

It seems that protection against rm ~/* is the practical answer.

On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 10:27 -0600, Charles Curley wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 11:13:18AM -0400, William Case wrote:
> > Hi All;
> > 
[snip]
> 
> Both. It's an ancient and honorable Unix tradition based on the notion
> that .* files don't normally get into shell expansions. So "rm ~/*"
> won't eat all your config files.
> 
It seems everybody has to do that once.  I know I did.

> It would not be easy to move all the dot files into a config
> directory. You would have to co-ordinate that across thousands of apps
> and dozens of different Unixes. I think we can depend on $HOME being
> available on most Unixes. Getting $HOME/config adopted would be a
> major effort.
> 
I thought it was mainly a traditional component.  As someone who has
only come recently to digging into Operating Systems, I am continually
amazed by how much is *not* brand new cutting edge, but rather is
generations old, conservative and traditional.

> I recommend against putting your own working documents into your home
> directory. Instead make one or more sub-directories for them. I have
> "business" for business related stuff, invoices and the like,
> "projects" and "src", for source code. Each has sub-directories for
> individual projects. I find it helps that when I'm working on a given
> project I only see the files related to that project.
> 

Yes.  I do.  But as you say, I always seem to end up with a bunch of
cruft in my home directory.

> This also means that things in ~ tend to be expendable, making pruning
> the cruft very easy.

> > 
> > I am not a complete newbie.  After 2 1/2 years of using Linux I am kind
> > of a 'gubie' or 'newru'.  (Newbie on the way to becoming a guru).  So if
> > you have an explanation that involves more than newbie baby talk, I can
> > handle it.
> 
> Uh, "gnubie"?

I like it.  3 bangs (maybe 4) for the buck rather than just 2.

-- 
Regards Bill