Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> as a regular user of rm for decades without any issue whatsoever this reads like parody.

Sure, for someone riding a horse for decades, a bicycle may look like a parody but people should look for more convenient methods.

> we're competent and confident enough with our holstered foot-guns that we're not a major threat to any system that is being administrated properly.

This is more like a parody that you should realize how many people are losing data over simple wrong "rm" everyday as apparently average people aren't as competent as you're with decades of experience.

Desktop Linux also has a trash bin like anyone would expect. Not sure why this is not the case on the command line.

Yes, aliasing rm to trash-put may screw bunch of scripts but that doesn't mean people should find out about trash-cli after they've lost data. Smart scripts should not rely on aliases but use a clean environment or specify a full path to a command as well.

It could act as trash-put when used interactively or how come rm itself can't evolve over POSIX when rm is one of the easiest way to screw yourself with no confirmation by default.




I've never once used `trash-put`, but thanks for introducing it to me. Personally I've never found the concept of a temporary storage area for files I want to delete to be helpful. Even on Windows I would Shift-Delete files to skip the step of having to review it later. And in most cases I would just empty the Recycle Bin without checking.

The thing is that many Linux commands can wreck your system if you're not careful: a wrong `dd` or `mkfs`, removing a core package and its dependencies, a wrong change in `/boot`, etc.

I've definitely lost work because of this, but it always served as a learning experience, and I was more careful next time. I don't think I'd want to use a system with training wheels, not even when I was learning. The whole idea of Unix is giving full control to the user, and respecting them enough to allow them to make mistakes. If I didn't want that I'd be using a more restrictive OS.

BTW, a good middle ground between raw `rm` and `trash-put` is `alias rm='rm -i'`. This way you can confirm deletions or pass `-f` to force it.


> `alias rm='rm -i'`

Done that 15 years ago.

Ended up using -f because the confirmation got annoying fast.

Landed onto using trash-cli and never had to bother anything when rm'ing.

You can add 'trash-empty 30' in daily cron to delete files older than 30 days in the trash.




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: