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Comment by danjc | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I managed to keep most of the code I wrote in TP7 as a kid (mid-nineties - I wasn't very up to date). It's stored safely in Cloud backup today having survived on a single 3.5" disk for many years prior to that.

Sometimes I like to fire up some of the stuff I wrote back then or even just look over the code. Brings back memories of the thrill of getting some of those ideas working for the first time.

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Good for you! I've lost most of my "childhood coding" stuff to an accidental `rm -rf /home /something` (note the extra space. Backups? what backups?) some ~18 years ago. That included a couple of DOS viruses, one of which was polymorphic (I wrote them just for fun and never spread them; did upload one to an antivirus vendor BBS back then through their "Submit a new virus" function and it's still in many databases because of that); a C++ rewrite of mars.exe voxel landscape generator, but with added rotation, music and lakes; a PWM-based WAV player for PC speaker; etc. I'm still quite sad about that accident ...

I remember an equally disastrous "rm -rf * ~". Again, notice the space, and also how the -r was completely unnecessary.

Fortunately these days everything is in version control and my editor doesn't clutter the current directory with backups anymore

This is the reason I adopted 'find . -type f -name "*~" -delete'.

Is there a way to stop rm from running if there’s a space?

IIRC, zsh has an option such that if you type `rm -rf /folder` it will ask

Sure you want to delete /folder with 382 files? (Y/N)

This would at least give you a chance to spot that it was asking about the wrong file.

If you're okay with being unable to remove multiple files at once...

I've definitely kept all my stuff from those days. I even once decided to throw some of it (with little organization beyond a few projects) on my public website:

http://www.logicprobe.org/~octo/history-code.shtml

What's actually more amazing is thinking back to the time distortion of being a kid. Stuff that really only took place over the course of a year or two, feels like 5+ years in terms of my perceptual memory of the era.

I’d love to see this! Imagine if we could see the childhood pictures from famous artists. Not suggesting your code is famous, maybe it is, but still I’m sure you’ve grown a lot since then.

I've thought it would be neat to put it on GitHub by executing a series of commits that have the dates faked according to the original file creation dates.

Probably the most complete project I did was a resource manager for Quake - it allowed you to export and import textures, sounds, vertex defs, etc.

Whether this should be public is another question altogether. Some of my code comments and readme files make me cringe today!

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