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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

The short flags are really there for when you're doing things interactively.

For scripts that are read and executed more often than they're written or changed, the long flags really help ensure you don't fat-finger.

I'm accustomed to typing `rm -rf` when really I just need `rm -r` in a lot of cases, and in PRs it's very easy for your eyes to glaze over when there's more than a single short flag.

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Why are you more likely to typo something in a script you can read, review, and test than an interactive command prompt that executes immediately?

I guess the differences are how long it takes to detect a typo, and therefore the blast radius in getting it wrong in a script that could be executed many times before you notice.

You literally always need -f with -r in a script (unless you want rm to prompt the user), though...

You must have an alias rm='rm -i' lying around. rm doesn't prompt by default (unless you're the owner of the dir, but not its contents).

    mkdir demodir && touch demodir/{foo,bar} && rm -r demodir

IIRC 'rm -r' prompts by default for read-only files as well even if you own them.

... huh. No, no alias, I just misread the manpage.

I could've sworn that -I was the default......

It's a common thing for IT departments or people making enterprise images to put in because they think it makes it safer.

I feel it does more harm than good by normalising rm -f when you want to recursively delete a folder, but with CD deployments these days it's less of a deal.

Yeah... no. Also definitely not the case. If I actually am remembering it correctly then it's probably from Fedora circa FC5 or Ubuntu circa 6.06. Back when I was in school and had never touched Linux other than on my own computer.

Go do a fresh install of CentOS/RHEL (or just spin up a new docker container) and what do you see in root's bashrc?

    alias rm='rm -i'
    alias cp='cp -i'
    alias mv='mv -i'

I've also encountered one job which adds this to their base ubuntu image, and my current employer uses Macs which have it added to bashrc by their mdm software on initial install.

So what's your justification to dismiss the idea that this is a common practice?

Aliases shouldn't be run in non-interactive shells IIRC.

I wasn't dismissing the idea that it was common practice, I was dismissing the idea that the common practice applied in my case. I did not have an IT department setting anything on my system when I experienced this.

Thank you for the info, though.

"CD deployments" - Ha, like an "ATM machine"? At first in thought you were describing deployments on compact discs!

CD, continuous deployment, is used to refer to the process not an individual instance like the term ATM. Simply saying "This deployment failed" doesn't convey that it's a deployment that was made through CD but "This CD failed" is also ambiguous as it doesn't indicate whether the process or the conditions particular to a deployment that caused it to fail. Using them both in combination like "CD deployment" seems perfectly valid to me to resolve both ambiguities.

To be fair though they were referring to CD deployment(s), plural, which is a bit redundant and just CD would have done just as well in this case.

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