I’m a complete moron, I should’ve had that backed up and used trash…
I had to learn the hard way lol
That’s why I always:
- cd .cache
- ls
- rm -r *
Type a space before rm to prevent it from being added to your history to be a extra careful.
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.
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 /
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.
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
In the few years of me exclusively using the command line to manage files, even having rm aliased to rm -rf, and at some point to sudo rm -rf, out of convenience, I think it has happened thrice that I deleted the wrong file, and twice I was able to restore it with (hourly) backups. The third time, it was a minecraft world which I had created to test some mods and the server start script, and I had excluded it from backups because my ~/games dir is usually only used by steam.
Ow.
