Emtyping trash

[Longman, Bill]

> Is there a way to empty the trash by using rm with out having 
> to reply each 
> time?  I can not empty the trash because of items in the 
> trash that are 
> causing problems.  I have used rm before, but each time it 
> asks for each file 
> in the trash and some of these can be quite long.  I just 
> want to be able to 
> remove every thing I have in the trash with out responding.  
> I have used the 
> different commands with rm, but they do not seem to do what I 
> want done.

It's because of the gal-dern alias. Some namby-pampy trying-to-do-well
decided it would be far better for users to get asked if they really want to
rm a file EACH AND EVERY TIME THEY NEED TO DO SO!!!!!!!!! (As you can tell,
I'm not a big proponent of this idea.)

So, they created a nice alias for everybody so that "rm" is not really "rm"
but "rm -i". It's usually defined in either /etc/bashrc,
/etc/profile.d/alias.sh or your ~/.bashrc file. I don't remember where it is
on YDL because one of the very first things I do is remove that IDIOTIC
alias.

Here's a funny story about this. For many years, I've had a shell script in
my bin directory that I wrote called "y". When you zap a bunch of files from
a directory that you have write access to, but the files you're deleting
don't belong to you or one of your groups, the shell asks you to confirm the
deletion with a "y" or "n". So, my script, "y", just has this in it:

echo "You\'re all done, butthead."

That's because, inevitably, you're typing yyyyyyyyy and there's one or two
y's left over once the scrolling is all said and done.

I had a bunch of other development scripts in my bin directory so over time,
several of the developers just added my bin to their paths. One day, I heard
my friend Charlie start cracking up laughing for no reason. He had been
deleting files and had hit one too many y's and got my rebuking shell script
response!