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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!
All Posts about Miscellaneous
2021 October 18 -- Favorite Podcasts 2019-2021
2020 February 9 -- Favorite Podcasts 2018-2019
2019 April 18 -- Lasercutter Memes
2018 October 26 -- Protecting Yourself Against rm
2018 September 3 -- Why I Left Amazon
2018 August 25 -- Blogging with Jupyter for Learning Julia Part 2
2018 August 17 -- Favorite Podcasts 2017-2018
2017 March 18 -- Blogging with Jupyter for Learning Julia
2017 February 15 -- Favorite Podcasts 2016-2017
2015 September 8 -- Installing Zim Wiki on OSX
2015 February 5 -- Word Frequency in the King James Bible
2014 February 13 -- A Fictional Middle East
2013 June 6 -- MIT Graduation Cap
2011 April 28 -- Playing Zork on Linux