Alias rm to a flag that makes you affirm. On my phone, can’t be bothered to look at a man page.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
18 points (80.0% liked)
Linux
58196 readers
343 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
alias rm=“rm -i”
Not a perfection solution, but one idea might be to use a rework of rm that places deleted files into a "trashbin"(just throws them into the tmp folder), so you can at least easily undo deletes
https://github.com/nivekuil/rip
I love tools like this. Thank you for sharing.
you could also make an alias for rm that just move things to the trash bin thingy
And then get screwed over when you're using another system without said alias. As I need to work on multiple different linux-hosts both as a selfhoster and on work I'd strongly suggest against aliasing any system command to something else and getting used to it.
yeah i can 100% imagine myself doing that, probably a good idea not to lmao
Yeah, there are a dozen "trash" commands. Honestly, I think changing muscle memory would be safer, but they could just install one of the trash commands and set up an alias as you say.
This is really user error, but if you want to be insane instead of using a proper workflow to prevent things like this: https://www.howtogeek.com/790679/how-to-use-the-chattr-command-on-linux/
=O may be this is it. Ill play with it to find it when get back home. But why are you calling "insane" thing. To me file attributes make sense
Are you running on btrfs? If not, why not? If so, install snapper and grub-snap or refind-btrfs, or whatever, and go wild.
Sounds like you might also be missing backups, but snapper you can have run every 10 minutes at almost no overhead. Then it won't matter if you delete something; you can always grab it out of a snapshot.
Daily backups. Then you can have as much wild ambition as you like. Disk failures do not care for your permissions bits anyway.
Practically though, one thing I find that's a good habit to get into is to use rmdir on directories that you know should be empty instead of rm -rf. If you've made a mistake and try to delete the wrong folder, it'll error out.
alias rm=trash-cli or shelltrash or something.
These days if the file is write protected, you get prompted for whether you really want to remove it. I don't know when that change appeared or whether it's universal.
No thats how it works. It hasnt changed. But lemmy hit you with my experience. I have 'notes' Dir. I write a lot. So I want myself 'write' permission but 'delete'