On 19Jan2018 19:18, Kenneth Wolcott kennethwolcott@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 7:03 PM, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Off-topic, but I struck an oddity trying to help a friend using Ubuntu send a wayward Firefox back to un-munged condition. I laboriously gave him instructions over the phone to type in:
rm -rfd .cache/mozilla/firefox
Only to have it chuck a hissy fit and claim the options were invalid. I tried changing the r option to R, with no further success. My quick search for on-line man pages for Unbuntu didn't show anything different than the options that would work in Fedora.
[...]
It wasn't helped by his (very) old Ubuntu installation having no menus, so had to figure out how to open a terminal without being able to see what he was doing, likewise for where they'd stashed the file browser.
Please make certain which "rm" is being used. Try "/bin/rm" to make sure that it is not an alias problem or a path problem.
Also: "which rm" should show what executable is being used, and the bash "which" IIRC also shows if an alias or function is involved (I'm a zsh person myself).
"( set -x; rm ........ )" is a useful debugging command (spawn subshell, turn on tracing, run command). It should show things as they are _after_ any alias expansion.
Cheers, Cameron Simpson cs@cskk.id.au (formerly cs@zip.com.au)