BOFH in a Nutshell

Colophon

CD(1)                   FreeBSD General Commands Manual                  CD(1)

NAME
     cd - change working directory

SYNOPSIS
     cd directory

DESCRIPTION
     Directory is an absolute or relative pathname which becomes the new work-
     ing directory.  The interpretation of a relative pathname by cd depends
     on the CDPATH environment variable (see below).

ENVIRONMENT
     The following environment variables affect the execution of cd:

     CDPATH  If the directory operand does not begin with a slash (/) charac-
             ter, and the first component is not dot (.) or dot-dot (..), cd
             searches for the directory relative to each directory named in
             the CDPATH variable, in the order listed.  The new working direc-
             tory is set to the first matching directory found.  An empty
             string in place of a directory pathname represents the current
             directory.  If the new working directory was derived from CDPATH,
             it will be printed to the standard output.

     HOME    If cd is invoked without arguments and the HOME environment vari-
             able exists and contains a directory name, that directory becomes
             the new working directory.

     See csh(1) for more information on environment variables.

     The cd utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
     csh(1),  pwd(1),  sh(1),  chdir(2)

STANDARDS
     The cd command is expected to be IEEE Std1003.2 (``POSIX.2'') compatible.


4th Berkeley Distribution        June 5, 1993                                1

RM(1)                   FreeBSD General Commands Manual                  RM(1)

NAME
     rm - remove directory entries

SYNOPSIS
     rm [-dfiPRrW] file ...

DESCRIPTION
     The rm utility attempts to remove the non-directory type files specified
     on the command line.  If the permissions of the file do not permit writ-
     ing, and the standard input device is a terminal, the user is prompted
     (on the standard error output) for confirmation.

     The options are as follows:

     -d          Attempt to remove directories as well as other types of
                 files.

     -f          Attempt to remove the files without prompting for confirma-
                 tion, regardless of the file's permissions.  If the file does
                 not exist, do not display a diagnostic message or modify the
                 exit status to reflect an error.  The -f option overrides any
                 previous -i options.

     -i          Request confirmation before attempting to remove each file,
                 regardless of the file's permissions, or whether or not the
                 standard input device is a terminal.  The -i option overrides
                 any previous -f options.

     -P          Overwrite regular files before deleting them.  Files are
                 overwritten three times, first with the byte pattern 0xff,
                 then 0x00, and then 0xff again, before they are deleted.

     -R          Attempt to remove the file hierarchy rooted in each file ar-
                 gument.  The -R option implies the -d option.  If the -i op-
                 tion is specified, the user is prompted for confirmation be-
                 fore each directory's contents are processed (as well as be-
                 fore the attempt is made to remove the directory).  If the
                 user does not respond affirmatively, the file hierarchy root-
                 ed in that directory is skipped.

     -r          Equivalent to -R.

     -W          Attempt to undelete the named files.  Currently, this option
                 can only be used to recover files covered by whiteouts.

     The rm utility removes symbolic links, not the files referenced by the
     links.

     It is an error to attempt to remove the files ``.'' and ``..''.

     The rm utility exits 0 if all of the named files or file hierarchies were
     removed, or if the -f option was specified and all of the existing files
     or file hierarchies were removed.  If an error occurs, rm exits with a
     value >0.

NOTE
     The rm command uses getopt(3) to parse its arguments, which allows it to
     accept the `--' option which will cause it to stop processing flag op-
     tions at that point.  This will allow the removal of file names that be-
     gin with a dash (`-'). For example:
           rm -- -filename
     The same behavior can be obtained by using an absolute or relative path
     reference.  For example:
           rm /home/user/-filename
           rm ./-filename

SEE ALSO
     rmdir(1),  undelete(2),  unlink(2),  fts(3),  getopt(3),  symlink(7)

BUGS
     The -P option assumes that the underlying file system is a fixed-block
     file system.  UFS is a fixed-block file system, LFS is not.  In addition,
     only regular files are overwritten, other types of files are not.

COMPATIBILITY
     The rm utility differs from historical implementations in that the -f op-
     tion only masks attempts to remove non-existent files instead of masking
     a large variety of errors.

     Also, historical BSD UNIX implementations prompted on the standard out-
     put, not the standard error output.

STANDARDS
     The rm command is almost IEEE Std1003.2 (``POSIX.2'') compatible, except
     that POSIX requires rm to act like rmdir(1) when the file specified is a
     directory.  This implementation requires the -d option if such behavior
     is desired.  This follows the historical behavior of rm with respect to
     directories.

HISTORY
     A rm command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.

BSD                            January 28, 1999                              2