I'm a complete moron, I should've had that backed up and used trash...
I had to learn the hard way lol

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[–] 21 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Here's a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:

  • If you type "rm", take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
  • If you then type "-r", do it again.
  • If you then type "-f" do it again.
  • In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.
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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I'm a big fan of starting the command with a #, then removing it once I'm happy with the command to defend against accidentally hitting enter

    Putting ~ next to the enter key on keyboards (at least UK ones) was an evil villain level decision

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    When I'm unsure, I ls <the-glob>, chek, then replace ls with rm.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    In the few years of me exclusively using the command line to manage files, even having rm aliased to rm -rf, and at some point to sudo rm -rf, out of convenience, I think it has happened thrice that I deleted the wrong file, and twice I was able to restore it with (hourly) backups. The third time, it was a minecraft world which I had created to test some mods and the server start script, and I had excluded it from backups because my ~/games dir is usually only used by steam.

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