Andrew Lentvorski wrote:

James G. Sack (jim) wrote:

Another practical recommendation:

 Never include _any_ paths in a rm -rf command


I disagree.

The idea: if you _never have any slash_ in the command then you can't
accidentally get a disaster such as could happen with inadvertent
spaces, such as

  rm -rf / path/to/somedir  .. would operate on '/'  OOPS


That isn't my normal "rm -rf" failure mode. In fact, I don't think I have *ever* made that mistake. The whole "/" followed by " " <space> just isn't in the muscle memory of my fingers.

In fact, when operating as root, I almost *always* use a full path because the tab completion actually helps verify that I'm nuking what I want to nuke.

My failure mode is:

"rm -rf . something"


Why would you use "rm -rf . something"? (Honest question.) (I never use -rf at all.)


". " is a common enough pattern that I don't automatically think about it. If you forget you are sitting in "/"--bye, bye, system.



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