I trolled myself by “learning” that I could delete all files in a directory, including hidden files, with rm -rf ./*. The mistake being that I (more than once…) accidentally put a space between the . and /.
And that’s why every rm command should start life as an ls command and then change the command and options while not touching the target directory. Takes a little longer, but saves so much hassle when you do fuck up.
I trolled myself by “learning” that I could delete all files in a directory, including hidden files, with
rm -rf ./*. The mistake being that I (more than once…) accidentally put a space between the.and/.And that’s why every rm command should start life as an ls command and then change the command and options while not touching the target directory. Takes a little longer, but saves so much hassle when you do fuck up.
This is the best advice in the whole thread.
Check what you’re doing before you do it.
Rm was updated to actually log a warning in the
-rf /cases, so that’s less likely to happen anymore. Still not a bad habit to use ls though/* still works I think
not if you use
/*. gp was totally screwed with their typo.I forced myself to use trash (from trash-cli) when I lost my first server install from this.
Nowadays, I’ve removed the alias from rm that asked me to use trash, and am still using trash if there’s a chance I might want to keep something.
I just alias rm to trash and if I really want to remove something I just escape the alias:
\rmCould do that, but they have different flu args.i respect the power of rm now.