What struck me, however, was this little tidbit from the notes section:

The name dsw is a carryover from the ancient past. Its

etymology is amusing but the name is nonetheless ill—

advised.

Well, obviously, that's a mystery in need of solving. I'll admit that not all Unix commands are clearly named, but this one was obscure even by those standards.

...

The original version of 'dsw' didn't have much of a user interface. Modern interactive file deletion commands do something like the following:

* Get a list of files in the directory.
* For each file, print out its name.
* Wait for the user to confirm deletion of the file.
* Repeat until there are no more files in the list.

'dsw' eschewed this obviously over-complicated interface by using the aforementioned woefully underutilized console switches.