venv --clear behavior is insane

[metamaterialsuit]

Bug report

Bug description:

# Add a code block here, if required

I don't know what to say besides who in their right mind thought executing rm -rf with no warning to the user was a good idea?

There is nothing in the documentation that even hints to the user that venv is going to do a thing so stupid that even non devs use rm -rf / as a joke.

A bug report was filed in 2022 on the old tracker, and, much to my endless amusement, it still exists today!

Please, please, I beg you, do SOMETHING about the default behavior. Play an ominous tone. Make the screen flash red in warning. Show a gif of a programmer crying.

Or just, you know, at least confirm that the user wants you to indiscriminately and recursively delete everything.

CPython versions tested on:

3.12

Operating systems tested on:

Linux

[hugovk]

It doesn't do rm -rf, it uses os.remove(fn) and shutil.rmtree(fn):

cpython/Lib/venv/__init__.py

Lines 94 to 100 in 9f2a34a

	def clear_directory(self, path):
	for fn in os.listdir(path):
	fn = os.path.join(path, fn)
	if os.path.islink(fn) or os.path.isfile(fn):
	os.remove(fn)
	elif os.path.isdir(fn):
	shutil.rmtree(fn)

Or are you expressing surprise that the directory is deleted without warning when you explicitly pass --clear?

venvs are intended to be transient, so you can safely delete and recreate as needed:

• Considered as disposable – it should be simple to delete and recreate it from scratch. You don’t place any project code in the environment.

[terryjreedy]

A bug report was filed in 2022

And it is still open. This seems like a duplicate. Hugo, to me it looks like #90484 should likely be closed.

[metamaterialsuit]

Sorry, I was being figurative. But that's not really the point.

I lost an entire source directory because I fat fingered the venv --clear. It even deleted the git repository, so there goes all that work.

Don't you think it would be prudent for venv to see if it's in a virtual environment and perhaps warn the user? And maybe add some documentation that venv --clear will recursively delete everything in its way?