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Comment by oneshtein | Hacker News Reader

I use Linux for 30 years. Never had this problem. However, I saw newbies, which copy paste commands from tutorials to shell and then frustrated, because # is a comment.

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I bet you've never accidentally rm -rf'ed your home directory or your email archives either.

> I bet you've never accidentally rm -rf'ed your home directory or your email archives either.

If this is a concern to mitigate, consider adding the following alias to your preferred shell profile:

  alias rm='/bin/rm -I'

This will not conflict with scripts using PATH-relative 'rm' invocations, yet will provide the desired protection from erroneous interactive use of "rm -rf".

See here[0] for details regarding the '-I' flag.

0 - https://linux.die.net/man/1/rm

This would have helped when I `rm -rf`ed my home directory, but I was on Ultrix, whose `rm` didn't have the `-I` flag. In fact, I don't think even GNU `rm` had `-I` yet. I was in /tmp/something where I'd unpacked some software package I'd downloaded and decided was of no use, and I wanted to read netnews, so I typed

    rm -rf * & cd; trn

Several hours later, around 3 AM, I was done reading netnews, so I exited trn. Then I remembered that there was one newsgroup I had forgotten to read, so I typed ↑↵ to run trn again, which had the effect of again running

    rm -rf * & cd; trn

but this time in my home directory. And of course my frantic ^C^C^C had no effect on the `rm`, which was safely in the background.

Fortunately the computer center kept nightly backups.

I alias rm='rm -i', and then check that I'm deleting the right thing. And then redo the command with `yes | rm -r whatever`. This ends up giving me an "audit log" of what was deleted.

I do

rm /dir

Then go back and add the -rf.

Works on GNU and BSD. On GNU only you can

‘rm /dir -rf’

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