Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"

[Thomas Sparrevohn]

On Wednesday 06 October 2004 02:31, Matthew Dillon wrote:

The university I used to work for had something like it and it got 99% of the 
cases 
>      Yow.  78 messages and counting.  Er, 79 now.  I'll bet poor Giorgos
>      wishes he never started this thread!  Get ready..... get set.... DIVE!
>
>      A good friend of mine has, for at least the last two decades, used
>      something along the lines of:
>
>      if ( $?prompt ) then
>   alias rm 'mv \!* $HOME/misc/trash'
>      endif
>
>      However, it seems that the correct solution is to create a new option,
>      -I, which puts rm into 'idiot user mode' and has all the desired
>      confirmation effects listed in this thread and none of the undesired
>      effects such as -i returns.  Then if anyone wants to use it they
>      can just create an alias similar to the above for -I and poof, problem
>      solved.  It's fairly easy to detect '*' and ask for confirmation,
>      and also easy to ask for a single confirmation on a directory (not
>      ask again for any recursion).
>
>      Then you guys can argue over whether the alias should appear in the
>      system-wide default csh.cshrc and friends, rather then argue over
>      the destruction of rm's basic nature.  I will only point out that 'rm'
>      is used fairly universally in scripts and there are obviously things
>      other then '/' that you would want to ask confirmation for that just
>      as obviously cannot be made default operation for rm.
>
>      -Matt
>      Matthew Dillon
>      <dillon at backplane.com>
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