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in reply to Re^3: Wrong idioms
in thread Wrong idioms

I remember a colleague who used to create files named "-i" in directories he wanted to protect. That way, when you did "rm *", the file list expanded into "rm -i ..." and you got prompted for each file. I'm not recommending it, but he liked it.

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Re^5: Wrong idioms
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Apr 03, 2013 at 14:21 UTC

    The first thing I do when given a new shell account is alias rm to rm -i to protect everyone from me. :P

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      I can understand that, but since I put almost everything under git, it's less interesting to me.

      However, personally, as part of my standard setup, I unalias all the common commands, in case some (IMHO misguided) sysadmin decides to inflict behaviour-changing options on standard commands via aliases. I'm all for a customized environment, but the standard commands (like ls, rm, cp, mv, ...) have to *work* the same or stuff breaks. Instead, I make my own shell functions, like e which is a wrapper around whatever my favourite editor is with name-remembering. I don't make an alias or function which has the same name as one of the usual commands as I've wasted too much time trying to figure out why a pipeline wasn't working due to ls not really being ls.

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