I’m a complete moron, I should’ve had that backed up and used trash…
I had to learn the hard way lol

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21 points

Here’s a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:

  • If you type “rm”, take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
  • If you then type “-r”, do it again.
  • If you then type “-f” do it again.
  • In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.
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10 points

I’m a big fan of starting the command with a #, then removing it once I’m happy with the command to defend against accidentally hitting enter

Putting ~ next to the enter key on keyboards (at least UK ones) was an evil villain level decision

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13 points

When I’m unsure, I ls <the-glob>, chek, then replace ls with rm.

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5 points

This. When the ls command works, hit ctrl-a, meta-d, type rm, enter.

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3 points

I really like this # idea. I’ve also taken to holding off on adding sudo when deleting privileged files

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1 point

I never thought of doing that in 40 years. It’s a great idea actually. Thanks!

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6 points

Or have backups (lol)

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23 points

AND have backups.

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1 point

In the few years of me exclusively using the command line to manage files, even having rm aliased to rm -rf, and at some point to sudo rm -rf, out of convenience, I think it has happened thrice that I deleted the wrong file, and twice I was able to restore it with (hourly) backups. The third time, it was a minecraft world which I had created to test some mods and the server start script, and I had excluded it from backups because my ~/games dir is usually only used by steam.

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1 point

Also, triple-check which machine you’re actually logged into.

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1 point

-i doesn’t exist?

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