Worth while bash hack (makes history even more valuable)

[Digital Wokan]

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 11:05 pm, Lynn David Newton wrote:
>   >> ... I teach them about the alias so they know what
>   >> is going on. If they man rmi or cpi they will not
>   >> find it so that is a much worse idea then just a
>   >> bit of explanation.
>
>   der> "rm *" in a directory and expecting to be able
>   der> to say yes or no to every file will not work.
>   der> "ksh: rmi: command not found" is easier to deal
>   der> with than lost data.
>
> I'm with Hans on this one. In 19 years of using Unix, I
> could probably count on one hand the number of times
> I've used the -i flag to rm. Or maybe on two hands.
>
> The correct behavior of rm is not to ask the user for
> confirmation. That's what they should learn, and also
> how to deal with it.
>
> It infuriates me when someone changes the defaults for
> me. I remember when I first started using Red Hat it
> frustrated me that no matter what I did it would ask me
> for confirmation. It was so far beyond my ability to
> comprehend that someone would have the audacity to
> change the behavior of a Unix command that had worked
> fine the way it is since 1969 that it didn't occur to
> me until sometime later that RH had aliased it. A big
> fat boo to them for doing that.
>
> Users who want that sort of behavior are entitled to
> create it themselves.

I still prefer the -i enabled, even on root.  (I just installed Gentoo and 
preferred it enough to set it in root's .bashrc.)
In case you didn't know, you can override the alias by prefixing the command 
with a backslash.
When I'm on my Mandrake box and want to take out an entire directory, I just 
type:
\rm -r dirname