this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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[–] naonintendois 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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 /.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

This is the best advice in the whole thread.

Check what you're doing before you do it.

[–] naonintendois 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

/* still works I think

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

not if you use /*. gp was totally screwed with their typo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I just alias rm to trash and if I really want to remove something I just escape the alias: \rm

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Could do that, but they have different flu args.i respect the power of rm now.