I’m a complete moron, I should’ve had that backed up and used trash…
I had to learn the hard way lol
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.
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.
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.
Use nix home-manager or guix home and put your configs in a git repo (this is my guix home config for reference)
That’s very helpful now. You have added nothing other than to pull the declarative distro equivalent of “I use Arch, BTW” And then link your literal code. For shame. For shame.
nix/guix can be used on any distro and it provides a way to organize .config files so that if the .config directory gets deleted or accidentally modified for some reason, restoring it would be very easy. By putting the configuration in a git repo, it also makes it easy to restore previous configurations. I accidentally deleted a bunch of stuff in my .config directory once and that’s one of the reason I use this tooling now, so I thought OP would find it helpful also
I once had a directory in
/tmp
calledetc
which contained subdirectories for something I was migrating.I thought that I was in
/tmp
when I ranrm -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 enterPutting
~
next to the enter key on keyboards (at least UK ones) was an evil villain level decisionWhen I’m unsure, I
ls <the-glob>
, chek, then replacels
withrm
.This. When the ls command works, hit ctrl-a, meta-d, type rm, enter.
Oh, didn’t knew about
Alt d
. Thx
I really like this # idea. I’ve also taken to holding off on adding sudo when deleting privileged files
I never thought of doing that in 40 years. It’s a great idea actually. Thanks!
Or have backups (lol)
AND have backups.
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.
ZFS and dotfiles are your friend. Sorry for your loss.
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.
I’m a complete moron,
You are not,
Every person learning with the hardway isnt a moron,You have to do, to really learn,
If you do it again though…
🫢 🤷♀️ I would say, that depend the personnal situation,
But i think, OP learned :)
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.
I should’ve […] used trash
For those who don’t know: trash-cli
It upsets me to no end that this isn’t a standard package 😭
What an awesome tool that I wish I knew sooner. Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.
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)?
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.
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…
if your session is still running you can use
env
to help reconstruct itI 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
But… why?
deleted by creator
Reason’s I never use auto-complete in the terminal. Sadly, that’s sometimes not enough.
just be careful and review what tab-suggest shows.