From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2018 18:17:16 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [TUHS] rm command
Message-ID: <20180425221716.B4C6718C086@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > From: William Corcoran

    > I think it's a bit more interesting to uncover why rm does not remove
    > directories by default thereby obviating the need for rmdir

On early PDP-11 Unixes, 'rm' is an ordinary program, and 'rmdir' is
setuid-root, since it has to do special magic (writing into directory files,
etc). Given that, it made sense to have 'rm' run with the least amount of
privilege needed to do its job.

	Noel