> But out of my perspective it's a feature and not a bug that unixy systems traditionally don't ask stupid questions after you told them to do something. It's an attitude of respect towards the operator: The system assumes that the operator knows what he is doing.

By the way, have you ever run across a situation where the standardized behaviour of rm without -f (to wit, check the permissions of each non-directory, and, if it's not writable, prompt if stdin is a terminal)?