This is why every system I administer has 'rm' aliased to 'rm -i' (along with 'cp' and 'mv' just in case). I believe this is the default on RHEL/CentOS boxes. Certainly for root, but should be for every user. Sure, it can be a pain sometimes to have to confirm, but at least you get the chance....unless you add '-f'.
This is why every system I administer has 'rm' aliased to 'rm -i' (along with 'cp' and 'mv' just in case).
Glad I'm not the only one. :-)
However, that is rather a specific case, albeit a common one. I have lost count of how many times I've seen even very experienced sysadmins do something disastrous by accident that is entirely due to the poor usability of some Linux shell or other command line-driven software with a similar design style and culture.
I have seen someone nuke an entire system, with a shell script that failed at string interpolation and literally did an 'rm -rf /', after I explicitly warned them of the danger and they thought they'd guarded against it. That person was a very capable sysadmin with many years of experience, but expecting anyone to never make a mistake with that kind of system is like expecting a similarly experienced programmer to write bug-free code with nothing but an 80x25 terminal window and a line editor.
Nothing makes you appreciate "don't miss" like deleting /etc
on a live system. For a good few weeks after that I nearly introduced a peer review process to my own shell.
That being said, there's certainly something to that one event doing more to reform my being fast and loose with destructive commands than years of being told/telling myself to do so. (Something likely being that I'm apparently a slow learner.)
