Well, not *that* interactive

I always alias rm to rm -i to prevent fat-fingered mishaps. This is usually too chatty if you try to recursively delete even a moderately big directory, so you have to go all out with rm -rf.

I get chills every time I type that little f in there and it turns out the new version of rm from GNU coreutils allows an alternate interactive mode -I that will prompt you once for all arguments. It also skips prompting altogether if you specify less than 4 files for deletion.

From the man page for rm:

If the -I or --interactive=once option is given, and there are more than three files or the -r, -R, or --recursive are given, then rm prompts the user for whether to proceed with the entire operation. If the response is not affirmative, the entire command is aborted.

1. paksoy posted this