funny story.

while in my coding directory, the one with all my projects and for some not-so-well-though-out reason it also includes my primary subversion repository, i was testing out a copy script that was copying some files to a temp dir in that dir. i got the script working and wanted to clear out the temp dir and test one more time just to be sure so i issued a

rm * temp/ -Rf

this boys and girls is why you DO NOT WORK ON A FRIDAY NIGHT!

after 7+ years on linux i still amaze myself with idiotic taps of my fingers

man that sucks. i didnt even see the mistake the first 2 times i read it. i need sleep too

There should be some sorm of protection against this sort of thing, built right into BASH.

"WARNING: The command you have chosen will result in the deletion of 3,050,110 file(s). Are you certain that you wish to continue? (y/N)"

What should it have been? temp/* I presume. lol

yes youre right, temp/*

exactly
i am considering adding to my sig

thats funny. seriously i am laughing for the first time in the last hour.. in my case it was probably only about 5,000 files, but when you get up over the 1000 mark of important files, the remainder really doesnt matter..

maybe, but if you bring this up to most linux people though they will say "bah!, dont be an idiot".. and normally i would say about that same thing also. probably a good "in someone elses shoes" moment.

just a stupid mistake. the asterix is now my most hated enemy.

yes i would go to sleep but i am afraid that i will dream about rm * commands

heh. i thought that it was taking an awful long time to remove 100 files. about 50 times too long.. blah.

man, rm already has that prompt/warning for deleting files, but if you choose to override it using the -f option, God help you.

From the manual of rm

yeh good point. BUT, there is only a rm warning for write protected files, that is mainly what the -f is used to override. and there was only a couple of files that were write protected in the dir i was dumping. unfortunately, all the files in the .svn dirs in my eclipse workspace were some of those because of the erroneous rm command.

i am not an advocate for changing rm, however now i am an advocate for not being a moron.

<begin obvious>
Yes, I know. Sometimes we use options without thinking at all. Unfortunately a computer, not being an intelligent being, just does what we ask it to do. Nothing more or less.
</end obvious>

It happens to all of us at times. I once cleaned out my Debian installation because I overwrote the wrong partition.

Sometimes it's better to use a GUI mode for these kinds of things as we know exactly what we're doing. CLI is very powerful and sometimes that power can be more than we can handle.

yeh a person can talk alot of smack about how using the cmd line is way better, until that person goes and does something like that person did.. then that person wishes they had the trash bin to recover their dignity from.

eh, still this is not enough to drive me to using a gui anymore than i do now. its just a bump in the road. i have done many a dumb thing over the years, this is just another on the list.

atleast all of my work-work is backed up at work, i only lost about 3 hours of time. but i did lose about 5 personal projects that i had put alot of time into..

now my only hope is that the whiskey will cure the pain..

i guess the only reason i admitted that i did this was so that everyone i have pissed off here could have a good laugh at my expense

only 1 thing to say

OUCH!!!!

I read this thread way late last night, and wouldn't you know it: I woke up this morning all freaked out after I dreamed I did the same thing (Worse yet, I don't have any backup hardware yet).
P.S. And don't get me started on the part where it got all psychadelic and the screen started rolling and melting. That's just typical of my dreams.

Ok, so, this, I'm gonna save, and make sure that this file opens each and every time I log into GNOME

Thanks for sharing that, buddy Believe me, you're not the only one whose done this! There're more of us than you think!

Dang that sucks. I do most of my rm from the command line, but things like this remind me why I should NEVER use the -f option. I'd rather sit and type "y" over and over again than do something like that.