From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Alexander Kriegisch Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:03:17 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] usage of '-rm -f ...' in .mk files In-Reply-To: <0710090011020.20512@somehost> References: <0710090011020.20512@somehost> Message-ID: <470AC545.5070605@Kriegisch.name> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net > Isn't it so that we want to know if an attempt to remove unremovable > files occurs, instead of ignoring errors by using '-rm -f'? I would say it depends on the situation. Normally the inability to remove files during a cleanup might not be considered worthy of turining into a show-stopper for the whole make process. In other cases that might well be so, and I guess it should be up to the developer writing the makefile to decide if she wants a possible error printed, but continue with whatever target is being built, or if she regards a failed unlink severe enough to yield an error. Having said that, I concede that "rm -f" usually does not exit with an error anyway, thus rendering "-rm -f" kind of useless. But on the other hand, double safety never hurts, and explicit coding helps understand what the author intends with a certain line of code. The leading dash is a clear statement saying "whatever happens, go on". Furthermore, there might be improbable cases in which a certain "rm" implementation might yield an error anyway. Given the fact that Busybox sometimes is very terse in error handling, leaving out improbable error conditions in order to save space, I would not say that an error during "rm -f" is absolutely impossible. I have not looked into the source code, though. Regards -- Alexander Kriegisch