this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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I'm a complete moron, I should've had that backed up and used trash...
I had to learn the hard way lol

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 43 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I should’ve […] used trash

For those who don’t know: trash-cli

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

It upsets me to no end that this isn't a standard package 😭

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What an awesome tool that I wish I knew sooner. Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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)?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I’m a complete moron,

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

You have to do, to really learn,

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If you do it again though...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

🫢 🤷‍♀️ I would say, that depend the personnal situation,

But i think, OP learned :)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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.
[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

When I'm unsure, I ls <the-glob>, chek, then replace ls with rm.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This. When the ls command works, hit ctrl-a, meta-d, type rm, enter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Oh, didn't knew about Alt d. Thx

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I really like this # idea. I've also taken to holding off on adding sudo when deleting privileged files

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

-i doesn't exist?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 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 /

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

That's why I always:

  • cd .cache
  • ls
  • rm -r *
[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Type a space before rm to prevent it from being added to your history to be a extra careful.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

For which shell? I just tried that on a bash system and the command was still stored in .bash_history 😔

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

ZFS and dotfiles are your friend. Sorry for your loss.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

You're just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

One of us...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

I should’ve had that backed up

Absolutely! IT's time to check out Stow now. With this you can easily manage your configuration and dotfiles (and all other data) in a single location.

https://venthur.de/2021-12-19-managing-dotfiles-with-stow.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

I should have had backups of important files in my home directory

Lessons learned the hard way

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Reason's I never use auto-complete in the terminal. Sadly, that's sometimes not enough.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

just be careful and review what tab-suggest shows.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Reasons to have backups more like. No need to make life hard

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago
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