On 19Jan2018 19:18, Kenneth Wolcott <kennethwolcott(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 7:03 PM, Tim
<ignored_mailbox(a)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(a)cskk.id.au> (formerly cs(a)zip.com.au)