- The fact that it’s very tricky to undelete files. People have created
LD_PRELOAD hacks that modify unlink to move files to a trash can – e.g.: libtrash, litetrash, delsafe. AFAIK, these are not default in any distributions.
- The
mkdir command in GNU coreutils supports a -p option to automatically create parent directories, but other utilities like touch, do not. I have tried to remedy this with a shell script wrapper and a patch to touch.
- The most convenient tools tools for managing packages and their dependencies –
apt-get, yum, etc. are based on lower-level tools like dpkg and rpm that understand the underlying package formats (deb and rpm). As a result, you can click a web link to install a .deb or .rpm package with a low-level tool, but the dependencies will not be handled.
- It’s unfortunate that there are so many different package formats,
deb and rpm being the most obvious, and then others like various tar.gz variants for Arch, Slackware, etc.
- X – It’s unfortunate that you can’t disconnect a running X program from an X server and then later reconnect it or connect it to a different X server. You can sort of achieve this kind of effect by using something like NX, but that only deals with an entire desktop; not individual programs/windows.
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There is a program called alien apparently that converts between rpm and deb and back again, but if it has any scripts inside that are remotely complex then it will fail and you may as well have been given a zip file. I wish they would standardize on one of them and then work on interoperability, making sure that you could install the same file on both Ubuntu and Fedora without modification.
Quite a lot of the command line utilities don’t have flags that are present in similar utilities. This is a source of endless frustration for me
unlink and rm optionally going to a trash folder first is a great idea, I would use it. Although that is just one of many potentially dangerous tools and you can’t ensafe-enate all of them without losing functionality, ie. mv, echo “” > valuable_file.txt etc. But yeah, unlink is arguably the most destructive so it does deserve special treatment.