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Comment by 5e92cb50239222b | Hacker News Reader

I just don't use rm directly, unless it's something very trivial and non-recursive. Start with ls, write out your path, execute it and check the results. If it looks fine, Ctrl+P → Ctrl+A → Alt+D → rm → Enter. Takes maybe two seconds more than just using rm, and definitely saved me more time over the years.

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I have a similar habit. I usually do "echo rm ..." or "echo destructive command ..." first, check the output (so wildcards are expanded, etc), and if I'm happy I bring the command back in the history and edit out the echo.

In bash, you can alternatively replace your shortcuts

    Ctrl+P → Ctrl+A → Alt+D

with `!:1-$`, where 1 is the index of the first argument you want from your previous command.

So:

    ls [files ...]
    rm !:1-$

I personally find it faster to use bash's history expansion. But, we're talking about subsecond differences here.

You can also do:

    $ ls [files ...]
    $ ^ls^rm

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