Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Unix 'rm' command

I feel that the Unix 'rm' command should come with a warning label. Something like:

Warning: Improper use of this command may seriously damage your health. If you are unsure of the correct usage, have heart problems or are pregnant please consult the man page or, alternatively, your sysadmin.


Now to see when my last backup was and to train my fingers never to type 'rm *' again...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might want to put this in ~/.bashrc

alias rm="rm -i"

so

rm something

becomes

rm -i something

and it will ask you if you really want to erase something.

John said...

Yeah I'd consider that, but it's too annoying if you want to delete a folder and you have to verify the deletion of each individual file within. Maybe I'll write something that triggers the prompt when I use 'rm' with a * where the star has whitespace either side...