David Haller said the following on 10/18/2012 10:13 AM:
And, as I've said, as per Murphy, that will affect at the most inconvenient time the most important file.
Right. And don't drink, you might choke, don't drive, you might crash; and so on and so on and so on. Its about risk management. Like everything else in life. There are no absolutes. David, all you're doing is a knee-jerk, irrational rant. Saying things that "It will happen, Murphy says so" are unhelpful. What I tried saying in my previous post is that there are reasonable and prudent measures that can be taken to mitigate the risk. Nothing in life is *absolutely* risk free. Heck, maybe someone dropped a file named "-f" in one of your directories! Now tell me, how likely is that? Can you tell me - absolutely - that it will happen? Of course you can, along with those millions of monkeys working on Shakespeare. Given enough time ... But what I'm trying to do is answer the OPs original question with a "reasonable and prudent" set of measures to ensure that any interactive shell *does* have the alias. Of course he may go use another machine, another account. There are many possibilities. But talking about absolutes is unhelpful. If the OP is willing to take those prudent measures and accept the risk, that's is his decision. You have made him aware there is a risk and I've made him aware that there are reasonable and prudent measures he can take to mitigate the risk. From there on in its his responsibility: not yours, not mine.
In short: only use 'rm' as is. Think about it being aliased/scripted or replaced by 'rm -f'.
The trouble is that this kind of paranoia requires that you run the 'alias' comment before any other command to make sure that things like 'grep' have not been aliased to 'rm -f'. Where does this stop?
But: aliasing rm is just evil.
Think end of the wedge: there's a lot in the bash shell, the Korn shell that you can label as such. Oh, right, the command line is just too powerful, too easy for people to make mistakes, that's why we have the cotton-wool cradle of the GUI ..
If you don't want to use 'rm' in the way it was intended to (see above), then just do not use it. Use a UI. Like mc or any of the GUIs and their "filemanagers" ... The latter usually also have a "Feature" called "Trash" (which they move the "deleted" files to, keep metadata (AFAIK) and can restore them from using the metadata). Bah!
<irony> You can ??? </irony> And there's the idiot who wonders why his/her disk is full, so 'deletes' a pile of files and _still_ the disk is full and blames the computer. Incidentally: my attitude to RM is that I have the delete button on my file manager really, really, really deleting the selected file or files. Like that, I suppose, I'm in agreement with Humpty-Dumpty. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone,"it means just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less." And I *choose* the delete key to mean delete and I *choose* the command line "rm" to mean "rm -i". You can choose differently. That's the beauty of Linux. If I wanted to be handcuffed to someone else's idea of how things should be done I'd use Windows (or possibly Gnome) -- “When dealing with people, remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotions.” —Dale Carnegie -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org