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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

My second boss was a Sun Microsystems enjoyer and he always pronounced “superuser” as “stupid user”.

After a raised eyebrow he went on to explain, “because when the machine is broken it’s always because some stupid user did something.

It took me a couple more stupiduser incidents of my own before I instituted a rule of counting to five before hitting enter on any `rm -rf` command.

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> I instituted a rule of counting to five before hitting enter on any `rm -rf` command.

That's just (should be) standard practice. Another risky command is `sudo dd`/`sudo cat` for writing disk images, always chant the disk device against an fdisk -l listing like a magical spell, lest you nuke your main drive.

When using `dd` I always verbally say "`if` is input file, because I want to take data from <whatever I wrote there> and `of` is output file, because I want that data to overwrite <whatever I wrote here>". Never have I ever had a `dd` incident, but that's such a fear I have that I developed this habit.

of stands for obliterated file

This is the way!

and dd is data destroyer

But it’s surprising how often you see the wheels turn when you explain it to someone else. It’s not obvious to everyone.

I always prepend a # when writing possibly dangerous commands, mostly rm -rf and dd. Started doing it after I wanted to dd an .iso of a distro to my usb drive but accidentally my main drive.

It can help if you press enter instinctively after finishing writing the command, and also against fat fingering an incomplete but valid command.

I've done it too, but probably not as consistent as you.

I like to prefix it with `echo` so I can see what it's trying to run, especially when wildcards are involved. Or things like `find`.

Echo is also very good for chaining with xargs to make sure you didn’t fuck up.

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