Well, the problem there is that Linux has rm aliased to 'rm -i',

Oh, that. See, that could as easily have been my own setup (and has been, in the past, until I got so used to reflexively hitting 'y' after typing 'rm' that it became useless). It doesn't address the basic issue of doing a stat() call to determine that it's a directory, asking you if you want to remove it, and then telling you it can't unlink it because it's a directory. if ( not recursive && directory ) { go directly to error message, skipping prompt } isn't exactly hard to code. I mean, if I do rm -i foo when foo doesn't exist, it goes straight to the error message without first asking me if I want to delete the nonexistent file.

I consider this dead horse to be well and truly flogged at this point.