Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com