On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Bardur Arantsson <spam@scientician.net> wrote:

Because *nobody* wants to follow symlinks when doing "rm -rf". Even if
they think they do, they *really* don't. Any design which relies on it
is probably fundamentally broken. (If they're *really really* sure, they
can write their own.)

Don't need to reread the arguments - I've been aware of them since CSRG introduced symlinks in 4BSD, and the utilities didn't know about them in the beta releases.

You pretty much never want to call it on a file tree you didn't build.  But if I built the file tree, then I know what's going on. Making me write my own is probably going to result in less robust code, or copying the code out of the library and tweaking it, neither of which is desirable.

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