you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 21 points 2 years ago (8 children)

I trolled myself by "learning" that I could delete all files in a directory, including hidden files, with rm -rf ./*. The mistake being that I (more than once...) accidentally put a space between the . and /.

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    And that's why every rm command should start life as an ls command and then change the command and options while not touching the target directory. Takes a little longer, but saves so much hassle when you do fuck up.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Rm was updated to actually log a warning in the -rf / cases, so that's less likely to happen anymore. Still not a bad habit to use ls though

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I forced myself to use trash (from trash-cli) when I lost my first server install from this.

    Nowadays, I've removed the alias from rm that asked me to use trash, and am still using trash if there's a chance I might want to keep something.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments