undo rm -rf *

[Bill Davidsen]

Reindl Harald wrote:
>
>
> Am 26.03.2013 17:16, schrieb Bruno Wolff III:
>> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 03:11:54 +1100,
>>    Celik <celik.n.00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Bruno, after such an experience, did you come up with an alternative
>>> solution to using "rm -rf"?
>>> "rm -i" is good as it prompts before deletion however it becomes tedious if
>>> there are a lot of files to be deleted, hence "rm -rf" seems ideal but
>>> dangerous if not cautious :(
>>> Had a look on google, there was one particular recommendation that caught
>>> me attention (sorry I don't have the link). It was recommended to mv the
>>> files (and/or folders) to be deleted into a tmp directory. I'm planning to
>>> try that in my future code, we'll see how things go.
>>
>> Try to be more careful, especially when there is an asterisk involved. And I keep in mind about '..', so no
>> deleting '.*'
>
> and how yoill you remove all hidden files of a folder?
> this is safe since a very long time
>
> [root at testserver:/tmp]$ LANG=c; /usr/bin/rm -rf .*
> /usr/bin/rm: cannot remove directory: '.'
> /usr/bin/rm: cannot remove directory: '..'
>
For ease of typing usually:
    rm .[a-z]*
will do, or if paranoid:
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname .\* -exec rm "{}" \;
which avoids directories because you (usually) didn't mean that.


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot