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BillyD
Guru
Joined: 05 May 2002
Posts: 323
Location: Australia
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 Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2002 12:35 am Post subject: Minimize the risk of accidental deletions |
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I guess this will be old news to many, but after reading a few posts asking for advice after accidentally deleting files, and doing it myself a couple of times, I thought I would include a tip for those that wish idiot proof their boxes a little more but are unsure how.
Adding the following code to your .profile gives you a few options when using the all powerful rm command.
will ask you a yes or no question before the file(s) is actually deleted, giving you a second or two to think it over.
This can be annoying when you a deleting in bulk, so you can add another alias for the times when you are going to be getting rid of a lot of files:
which will not prompt you for a confirmation.
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We used to have hominid cousins that were vegetarian. The palæontological record suggests that our ancestors killed them and ate them. |
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proxy
Apprentice
Joined: 20 Apr 2002
Posts: 260
Location: Chantilly, VA
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| Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2002 8:42 am Post subject: |
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actually the -f flag overrides the -i flag...so what normally do (and have come to expect on the systems i have setup) is alias rm to rm -i and what i want to do a mass deltion i just type "rm -f" which is effectivly "rm -i -f"...which of course doesnt ask 
so by it self the alias is very intuative.
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meowsqueak
Veteran
Joined: 26 Aug 2003
Posts: 1549
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 5:36 am Post subject: |
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After reading through some old posts in the forum today, I came across this handy hint:
If you create a file called '-i' in your home directory as such:
if you are ever in ~ and accidentally type 'rm *' with any options (which makes it a bit more flexible than the aliases above) then the shell will expand it out to 'rm file1 file2 ... -i' which rm will interpret as being the -i option.
This is useful if you ever accidentally add a space to the command, for example:
| Code: | | localhost [~] $ rm -r -f src/ * |
Oops! This hint might just save your home directory in this situation! |
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Kodama
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 85
Location: Linköping, Sweden
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 5:39 pm Post subject: |
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Here's a tip that have saved my life a few times.
| Code: | alias rm='remove'
alias emptytrash='"rm" -r /trash/*'
remove()
{
mv "$1" /trash
} |
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koala
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Posts: 91
Location: Barcelona, Spain
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| Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 7:04 pm Post subject: |
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| meowsqueak wrote: | After reading through some old posts in the forum today, I came across this handy hint:
If you create a file called '-i' in your home directory as such:
if you are ever in ~ and accidentally type 'rm *' with any options (which makes it a bit more flexible than the aliases above) then the shell will expand it out to 'rm file1 file2 ... -i' which rm will interpret as being the -i option.
This is useful if you ever accidentally add a space to the command, for example:
| Code: | | localhost [~] $ rm -r -f src/ * |
Oops! This hint might just save your home directory in this situation! |
are you sure you know what does the -i option do in all commands you might execute? |
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meowsqueak
Veteran
Joined: 26 Aug 2003
Posts: 1549
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 1:29 am Post subject: Good point |
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Yeah, you make a very good point. If I'd thought about this a bit more I would have realised that too. As such, I have removed this 'helpful' little file...
Which leads to an interesting thought - what sorts of filenames can you create that cause trouble? I read somewhere about putting a special filename somewhere so that doing a 'find | xargs rm' ended up removing the root directory. You should use this instead:
| Code: | | $ find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ... |
This handles annoying files with spaces in them too. |
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