<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><base class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Aug 20, 2018, at 10:17 AM, Christopher Jones <<a href="mailto:jonesc@hep.phy.cam.ac.uk" class="">jonesc@hep.phy.cam.ac.uk</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On 20 Aug 2018, at 4:03 pm, Lee Bast <<a href="mailto:x-lists@asgarda.com" class="">x-lists@asgarda.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Aug 20, 2018, at 1045 , William Parducci <bill@parducci.net> wrote:<br class=""><br class=""></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" class="">For future reference NEVER issue sudo rm -rf in a multiline command. It is just asking for stuff like this to happen.<br class=""></blockquote><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The guide (and a lot of MacPorts in general I guess) is more aimed at devs and power users so it kind of assumes everyone is comfortable with the CLI and knows basic footguns, but looking at that page it might be a reasonable idea to not just tell people to run a copy-pasted multiline sudo rm -rf command. It's a dangerous enough thing and it's a low bar to not say "copy and run this" and change it to "here are a list of MacPorts' file and directory locations, delete them for a full manual removal", then leave it to users.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">Whilst I have myself pointed people at that page myself in the past, perhaps a case could be made that having a public web page with instructions that start with “sudo rm -rf “ is perhaps not the best idea. If the user copies the command badly, and doesn’t appreciate how powerful it can be, they could (and it seems have) run into problems.<br class=""><br class="">Perhaps we should not have that command explicitly written there. Better yet perhaps and official ‘uninstaller’ that does the equivalent in a control manner would be better.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">Another option for consideration is to put in a disclaimer along the lines of “DO NOT ATTEMPT UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS DOES AND THE RISKS INVOLVED.” on pages that have OS command line executables and/or recompose the commands to individual lines so as to—in theory—make them less prone to misapplication:<br class=""><br class=""><font face="Courier" class="">$ sudo rm -rf /opt/local</font><br class=""><font face="Courier" class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Applications/DarwinPorts <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Applications/MacPorts <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/macports1.0 <br class="">$ sudo rm -rf ~/.macports<br class=""></font><br class="">b</body></html>