Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.
Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.
Ran
rm -rf /*insteas ofrm -rf ./*Create an alias with:
alias rm='rm -i'It’s not recommended to alias a command, especially a common one, to something that fundamentally changes the behaviour like this. The reason is that one day you might be on a different system - or a fresh install - that doesn’t have the alias in place.
And suddenly files disappear without the now-expected prompt.
By all means set up an entirely different or unused command name.
rmimight be ok, but then again, you could miss theiand still be in hot water.The usual exception to this is aliasing commands like
lsto include user preferences that only change output behaviour. On a different or fresh system, the worst that happens is the user doesn’t quite see what they’re expecting, but will see something close enough and no files go missing.I actually fixed that issue by writing a script that just moves sruff I want to delete to a folder (in my case TrashBin)
If you’re on a GNOME or GTK system, check if you don’t already have the
giocommand. It has atrashsubcommand that puts a file into the desktop trash/rubbish bin. It can also be used to resurrect files from there.gio help trashshows the usage.You might even want to incorporate it into your existing script.