• 3 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • That’s a good example. If I’m regularly running a command that is a single whitespace character away from disaster, that’s a problem.

    Imagine a fighter aircraft that had an eject button on the side of the flight stick. The pilot complains “I’m afraid I might accidentally hit the eject button when I don’t need to”, but everyone responds “why would you push the eject button if you don’t want to eject?”, or “so your concern is that the eject button will cause you to eject…?” – That’s how I feel right now.


  • Just checked my command history and I’ve run 60,000 commands on this computer without problem (and I have other computers). I guess people have different ideas of what “comfortable” means, but I think I consider myself comfortable with the command line.

    I have shot myself in the foot with rm -rf in the past though, and screwed up my computer so bad the easiest solution was to reinstall the OS from scratch. My important files are backed up, including most of my dotfiles, but being a bit too quick to type and run a rm -rf command has caused me needless hours of work in the past.

    I realized the main reason I have to use rm -rf is to remove git repos and so I thought I’d ask if anyone has a tip to avoid it. And I’ve found some good suggestions among the least upvoted comments.


  • That’s a good suggestion for some, but I’m quite comfortable with the command line.

    It’s not that I’m irrationally scared of rm -rf. I know what that command will do. If I slow down an pay attention it’s not as though I’m worried “I hope this doesn’t break my system”.

    What I really mean is I see myself becoming quite comfortable typing rm -rf and running it with little thought, I use it often to delete git repos, and my frequent use and level of comfort with this command doesn’t match the level of danger it brings.

    Just moving them to /tmp is a nice suggestion that can work on anywhere without special programs or scripts.