Agreed.  Plus, it’s unmistakable that rm meant “remove” when you examine her sister “rmdir.”

I think it’s a bit more interesting to uncover why rm does not remove directories by default thereby obviating the need for rmdir—-especially since the potentially nightmarish  incantation of “rm -rf” does include files, folders and just about everything else in between.

Bill Corcoran

On Apr 25, 2018, at 5:36 PM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl at gmail.com<mailto:jpl.jpl at gmail.com>> wrote:

Another country heard from.<http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue49/fischer.html> I doubt the Robert Morris story, given that a command as fundamental as "rm" must have come about very early in the development, and there isn't a pattern of naming commands after their authors.

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 1:22 PM, Eric Blood <winkywooster at gmail.com<mailto:winkywooster at gmail.com>> wrote:
I came across this yesterday:

> Fun fact: according to unsubstantiated UNIX lore, "rm" is NOT short-hand
> for "remove" but rather, it stands for the initials of the developer that wrote
> the original implementation, Robert Morris.
>
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916565

I was curious if there's any truth to it.  I found
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl and was poking around but
couldn't determine when the rm command came about.

Thoughts?

--
Eric Blood
winkywooster at gmail.com<mailto:winkywooster at gmail.com>

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