Michele Pratusevich

mprat@alum.mit.edu

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October 26, 2018

Protecting Yourself Against rm

Those who use the command-line on GNU/Linux operating systems know and love rm. But it also comes with so much power! No one wants to accidentally rm -rf the company data. To prevent myself from doing this on our data server, I aliased rm to something more sensible.

First, I created a shell script ~/are_you_sure_rm.sh in my home directory. The file was pretty simple:

#!/bin/bash

echo "You just tried to do rm.
If you really meant to do so, then type /bin/rm followed
by what you want to do. It will be unprotected.
It is recommended you do /bin/rm -i for interactive mode."

Next, I made it executable:

chmod +x ~/are_you_sure_rm.sh

Lastly, I added an alias for rm to the native shell by adding this line to my ~/.bash_aliases file.

# make sure to prompt on every removal of a file
alias rm="~/are_you_sure_rm.sh"

After logging out and back in, my new superpower is activated.

Now every time I try to rm something when SSHed into the company data server, my shell warns me! Amazing!

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