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Sourabh
Asked: 2013-12-03 10:56:14 +0800 CST

rm -I to prevent accidental rm

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I just created alias rm="rm -I" to prevent from accidental rm command.

-I     prompt  once before removing more than three files, or when removing recursively.
       Less intrusive than -i, while still giving protection against most mistakes

But it doesn't work. I don't get any prompt when I use rm -rf

rm

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you read the help again you'll see it says previous --interactive. This means you can add an -I after all the other arguments (like at the end of the line) and it'll be honoured again!

    To do that, you need a function instead of an alias, but just stick this somewhere in your .bashrc (et al) and you're golden:

    function rm { /bin/rm "$@" -I; }

    A perhaps safer method than even this is using trash-cli's trash-put command. It will put things in your account's trash directory that can be reviewed/restored/emptied normally. It also has dummy -r, -f and, -i arguments so it makes a perfect alias possible:

    alias rm="trash-put"
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  2. The problem here is that -f makes rm ignore any interactive command:

    `-f'
`--force'
   Ignore nonexistent files and missing operands, and never prompt
   the user.  Ignore any previous `--interactive' (`-i') option.

    Source: info coreutils 'rm invocation'

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