Re: major blunders

From: Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 11:19:02 -0700
Message-ID: <bf46380910091119t7d6337d9safc0452cfed36479_at_mail.gmail.com>



Every little bit helps.
Using rm * has already been dismissed as a bad idea, so it would seem that rm somedir/* would also be a questionable practice.

If there's a way to screw up, all of will find it at some point.

The idea is to mitigate the risk as much as possible.

Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist Oracle Blog: http://jkstill.blogspot.com Home Page: http://jaredstill.com

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Aaron Leonard <aachleon_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> I'd be very wary of relying on that. It doesn't account for when you are
> not in the directory which contain the files your are deleting.
>
> oracle:~/adl/tmp> for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7; do echo 1 > file$i; done
> oracle:~/adl/tmp> touch -- -i
> oracle:~/adl/tmp> rm -f *
> rm: remove regular file `file1'?
> oracle:~/adl/tmp> rm -f *
> rm: remove regular file `file1'? n
> rm: remove regular file `file2'? n
> rm: remove regular file `file3'? n
> rm: remove regular file `file4'? n
> rm: remove regular file `file5'? n
> rm: remove regular file `file6'? n
> rm: remove regular file `file7'? n
> oracle:~/adl/tmp> n
> bash: n: command not found
> oracle:~/adl/tmp> cd ..
> oracle:~/adl> rm -f tmp/*
> oracle:~/adl> ls -l tmp
> total 0
> oracle:~/adl>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Fmhabash <fmhabash_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> If I may add ...
>>> - I altered behavior of 'rm' cmd forcing it to be interactive needing
>>> user confirmation. Scripts coded to use non-interactive version.
>>>
>>
>> A trick to avoid accidentally deleting files you would rather keep.
>>
>> Create a file called '-i' in key directories. This will force rm -f to go
>> into interactive
>> mode, as the '-i' filename is interpreted as an argument.
>>
>> Create '-i' file: touch -- -i
>>
>> The double dash is used to tell rm (or any other *nix command) that the
>> following stuff on the command line is not a command line option.
>>
>> Remove the file: rm -- -i
>>
>> Create a tmp directory, copy a few files into it, and try it.
>>
>> It has saved me at least once.
>>
>>
>> Jared Still
>> Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist
>> Oracle Blog: http://jkstill.blogspot.com
>> Home Page: http://jaredstill.com
>>
>>
>

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Received on Fri Oct 09 2009 - 13:19:02 CDT

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