Furious and deprived by 'rm *'

15 October 2005 2 comments Linux

This blog post is 12 years old! Most likely, its content is outdated. Especially if it's technical.

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

Reply

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.

Reply

Previous:: table-layout: fixed 13 October 2005
Next:: Playing with Reverend Bayesian 19 October 2005

Related:: File check before delete 07 March 2008; Mvbackupfiles - a script to "delete" back autosaved backup files 24 November 2005; Running simple SQL commands on the command line 08 January 2005

Home Archive About Contact Search

Check out my latest side project Song Search

Furious and deprived by 'rm *'

Comments

Related posts