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.
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
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.