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Comment by _nalply | Hacker News Reader

Once I wanted to do `rm -fr *~` to delete backup files, but the `~` key didn't register...

Now I have learnt to instinctively stop before doing anything destructive and double-check and double-check again! This also applies to SQL `DELETE` and `UPDATE`!

I know that `-r` was not neccessary but hey that was a biiiig mistake of mine!

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For entirely critical systems, I by now rather generate a reviewable script and run that. Something along the lines of:

    find /backups/ -mtime '-30' -printf 'rm -f %p\n' > very_scary_deletes.sh

This gives you a static script with a bunch of rm's. You can read that, check it, give it to people to validate and when you eventually run it, it deletes exactly those files.

That's clever, only do really dangerous things if you have a way to carefully review the steps.

Another way is sometimes: `echo *.txt~` and when you like the result, replace `echo` with `rm`.

I do this too. Although I usually do `echo rm .txt~` then just remove the `echo` once everything works. Also works well for things like `parallel` and `xargs` where you can do `parallel echo rm -- .txt` and it basically prints out a script. Then you can remove the `echo` to run it.

If you ever type really dangerous commands, it is good practice to prefix them with a space (or whatever your favorite shell convention is) to make sure they not saved in your history.

One of my "oopsies" involved aggressive <up> and <enter> usage and a previous `rm -rf *` running in /home...

I didn't know about the space thing!

Though for me, I think the greater risk would be from not having a record of what I'd run.

One time I was debugging the path resolver in a static site generator I was writing. I generated a site ~/foo, thinking it would do /home/shantaram/foo, but instead it made a dir '~' in the current directory. I did `rm -rf ~` without thinking. Command took super long, wondered what was going on, ctrl-c'd in horror... that was fun.

I’m really curious: without cheating by using the GUI, what would be the proper way to delete such an obnoxiously-named directory? Would “$PWD/~” work?

A few ways.

rm ./~ is likely the easiest.

Another option, shell dependent, would be to turn off shell globbing.

The `GNU` version of `find` has a `-maxdepth` option so

find . -iname '~' -maxdepth 1 -exec rm {} \;

would work, but I don't like relying on `GNU` extensions.

Or just: rm "~"

You remind me of that time I wanted to `rm -rf ./*` but the dot hadn't registered... I now avoid that statement.

I click in Explorer. Have to confirm too. Never been confused.

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