Hi, Andrew M.A. Cater: > There's an > rm -i > switch to the rm command. This makes the removal interactive - you get > an "Are you sure [Y/N]" warning for each file. This is useful for a single > critical file, less useful when you're removing a hundred logfiles.
After alias rm='rm -i' it is still possible to do non-interactive removals by /bin/rm > On a Red Hat-derived system, this is often aliased to rm by default. I got mine from SuSE more than 20 years ago. Since then i have alias cp='cp -i' alias mv='mv -i' alias rm='rm -i' > That's a great idea - until you move to a system where rm means rm > immediately. Probably one will become cautious already by the misconfigured vim there. :)) But yeah. rm on a foreign computer is always hair raising. > Try and avoid using rm -rf and forced removal. After such operations i even go back in bash's readline buffer and change /bin/rm -rf to rm -r so that i cannot execute the killer command by overly eager use of the arrow-up key. > For the general "I rm'd something critical" - there is no absolute solution. The backbone of precautions against such a mishap is a sufficiently complete backup which cannot be easily deleted by mistake. I prefer DVD and BD media for that. But i'm from last century ... After "rm -rf /" one probably has to re-install the system first, unless there is a complete backup image of the system disk. I made one (when running Debian Live) before i upgraded from Debian 10 to 11. In the end it was not needed, which is the best thing one can hope for with a backup. Have a nice day :) Thomas