Furious and deprived by 'rm *'

15 October 2005 2 comments Linux

In years I haven't accidentally deleted important stuff with rm * when what I mean is rm *~ to delete backup files, until...

Yesterday I accidentally deleted all templates for a work project when I wanted to delete the backup files which look like this foo.zpt~. In the haste I did:

$ rm *

When I meant:

$ rm *~

Today I did it again. I didn't want any backup files in my ~/bin directory which just screws up tab completion. Again, in the haste I accidentally deleted all my bin scripts :( Most of it recoverable or easily rewritable but still a f**ing nuisance. What to do? Do people have any good suggestions to make the rm work more like the Trash can does on the desktop?

Emil Erlandsson

16 October 2005

Add an alias in your shell config (if it supports aliases that is) so that 'rm' always asks you before any deletion. You can always override with -f if you don't want to answer any questions ...

alias rm='rm -i'

-i, --interactive prompt before any removal

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Sascha Welter

17 October 2005

Instruct your editor to put those backup files in the system tmp directory, set up your system to clean up there with the "daily" cron job. Everything that gets you to routinely type dangerous stuff should be eliminated.

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Furious and deprived by 'rm *'

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