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

  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
    1·
    24 hours ago

    i have rm aliased to rm -i, it’s basically the closest to PowerShell’s -WhatIfthat a posix shell gets

  • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    I once had a directory in /tmp called etc which contained subdirectories for something I was migrating.

    I thought that I was in /tmp when I ran rm -rf etc… I was actually in /

      • wh0_cares@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        14·
        2 days ago

        Holy shit, I never knew you could do that! I’ve always really wanted a feature to stop random commands from being added to my history.

        • Edo78@feddit.it
          1·
          2 days ago

          Some shells provide ways to prevent some commands to be added to the history

        • Peer@discuss.tchncs.de
          3·
          2 days ago

          Set the HISTCONTROLvariable. If it is set to ignorespace then commands entered with a leading-space will not be stored in the history.

    • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      2 days ago

      rm -r *

      Also, if you have to type that, don’t use the numpad: / is only one key away from *. If you finger snags the / key on its way to * and you happen to be root, your root partition will go bye-bye.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
    23·
    3 days ago

    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.
    • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      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

        • Lucy :3@feddit.org
          2·
          3 days 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.

  • TGhost [She/Her]@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    3 days ago

    I’m a complete moron,

    You are not,
    Every person learning with the hardway isnt a moron,

    You have to do, to really learn,

      • clb92@feddit.dkEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.

        I’m guessing something like… Copy file/dir from location A to location B and then delete from A, but the copy had failed (and the delete unfortunately worked fine)?

        • UnRelatedBurner@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          3 days ago

          I left the last sentence open ended, for comedic effect, but if you really wanna know:

          I transcoded videos with ffmpeg, and tried to exit out of the bash script with ctrl C. the script was something like:

          for
    ffmpeg file finishedFile;
    rm file;

          my ^C broke out only from ffmpeg and before I realized what happened the file got removed and the next ffmpeg call filled my terminal. I tought the key didn’t register, or something was stuck, so I pressed it again… and again… it cost like 45minutes of footage, wasn’t that important tho.

  • xlash123@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    2 days ago

    I’ve started adopting the habit of putting “-rf” as the last argument to avoid accidentally deleting something before I’ve double-checked my input. Good luck, and may this never happen again.

    • Edo78@feddit.it
      1·
      2 days ago

      I do exactly the same. It’s not foolproof but it’s better than nothing. I remember, almost a decade ago, when I discovered that rm on mac didn’t accept flags as last arguments… I hope they changed that behavior

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    if your session is still running you can use env to help reconstruct it

  • RenardDesMers@lemmy.ml
    6·
    3 days ago

    Sorry for your loss. I did something similar recently. A script was creating a “~” folder in my notes folder. I wanted to delete it… Thankfully it stopped at some file it couldn’t remove and my dotfiles are in git.

    • ma1w4re@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 days ago

      A tip, to delete files that have names similar to variables or other expandables, put the filename in between single ticks like this ‘filename’. Single ticks prevent expansion.

  • sadTruth@lemmy.hogru.ch
    7·
    3 days ago

    Tipps to prevent future accidents:

    • Set up BTRFS snapshots with Timeshift or Snapper. Switching to BTRFS is worth it for snapshots alone.
    • Do regular backups on a device that can not be reached by rm: vorta local on external hdd that you connect once a week OR vorta/borg2 to a NAS/Server that does BTRFS snapshots itself OR Nextcloud to sync to a server that has a trashbin OR git to a server. Just remember that Nextcloud and git are unencrypted, so the server has to be secure and trustworthy. Vorta and borg2 can be set up with encryption.

    Mistakes are unpreventable due to our error-prone brains, but it is a choice to repeat them.