I just deleted some Perl scripts I was working on. I should have them back tomorrow from tape, but I'm not happy with myself. On almost every nix system I've ever used, rm has been aliased to rm -i, but not on this one, though it is now. Even if I blame it on my hay fever and nasty headache, I feel a right plonker at the moment.....
Re:rm -i is bad because ...
ajt on 2003-06-17T19:19:27
I can see the argument in this, indeed, you could say that's why I screwed up. Thankfully it's not serious, and the files are backed up, but it was annoying....
CVS, that something that we hope to implement soon....
Re:rm -i is bad because ...
petdance on 2003-07-15T22:23:53
There's no reason you can't run your own CVS repository locally, just yourself. It doesn't have to be installed and used by everyone in order for you, personally, to take advantage of it.Re:rm -i is bad because ...
ajt on 2003-07-18T20:35:32
I know, it was a feeble excuse, but now I'm in a team of two instead of one, a lot of things will be done better.....
Re:backups
ajt on 2003-06-17T19:27:21
When I was doing my PhD, I saw many people suffer horribly at the hands of lost files, and the University showed no mercy. As a result I was paranoid, and had back-ups on different PCs, different Unix servers, and on floppy disks all over the country. As you would expect I had no problems at all, but I've taken a reasonable attitude ever since.
Over the years I've had NT die a few times, and take the NTFS partition with it, so I've always kept data spread over multiple partitions, and I make regular backups to CD-R.
In this case it was some scripts to do a process once, that I was re-using, and instead of deleting the log files, I deleted the scripts. I'll survive - though I did feel very stupid.
Re:Me too
ajt on 2003-06-17T19:31:41
I was thinking about this on the way home, it can't be that hard to make rm do backing up on the fly. But as drhyde pointed out above, it could lull one into a false sense of security, and one could still come unstuck!
I suppose I'll just have to bite the bullet and actually use CVS properly.
Backing up != 'rm -i'
runrig on 2003-06-17T20:45:14
With 'rm -i' you get into the habit of just saying yes, but with an 'rm' that backs up, it just happens all the time. And even with CVS, I could see losing a days worth of work with 'rm *.somthing' and accidentally putting a space between the '*' and the '.'I wasn't sure myself if I'd like my rm alias, but so far it's been fine for me.
Re:Backing up != 'rm -i'
runrig on 2003-06-17T20:47:01
And 'rm -i' is annoying when you're removing lots of files.Re:Backing up != 'rm -i'
ajt on 2003-06-17T20:56:35
Very!
Re:Backing up != 'rm -i'
drhyde on 2003-06-18T08:39:41
Override it with -f.Re:Backing up != 'rm -i'
koschei on 2003-06-17T23:31:24
One of the reasons I enjoy using zsh as my shell: it catches 'rm *' (and the assorted variants that are mistypes of others buthave the same effect) and asks:Very nice.zsh: sure you want to delete all the files in/home/iain/foobar [yn]? Re:Backing up != 'rm -i'
drhyde on 2003-06-18T08:43:15
Does this not suffer from the same problem as aliasing with -i? I know that my muscle memory would very quickly pick up on typing rm * enter y enter.Re:Backing up != 'rm -i'
koschei on 2003-06-18T09:17:22
If rm ever wants me to confirm something, I'm doing something wrong. Thus it never enters muscle memory to automatically press 'y'.
If you've aliased with -i, you'll be asked for confirmations on every little thing. With this, it's only major things that you probably didn't mean.
Of course, if you switch between accounts, some using zsh and some not, you'll have a problem =)
Recently, I tried to create a local CPAN config, and after typing 3 times the
The mistake was to set the values as '$HOME/foo' (note the single quotes). Friendly as ever, CPAN.pm was very happy to create a directory named $HOME in my home directory. So my next move was to type rm -rf $HOME. I mean, that's exactly what I wanted to do... not.
Thanks for the backups. Very much.
Re:rm -rf $HOME
ajt on 2003-06-18T10:29:51
Very bad.... A little bit more drastic than my cock-up. As I read somewhere recently "a flamingo-up" like a cock-up only bigger and pink.
Yes, I know "cock-up" is not a reference to the anmimal or body parts, but it sounds good when things go wrong....
termYYYYMMDD so I just did a quick rm te*. The problem? My program was called termrpt.pl. So seeing as I hadn't committed the changes to CVS and the backups had yet to run for the day - I was SCREWED.Re:Been There...
ajt on 2003-06-18T20:07:25
I don't have the luxury of CVS (yet), so it was a good job I'd just started, but I do have tape backup, so in my case not a dissaster, however, things will have to change, as it could have been very bad!
Re:Been There...
drhyde on 2003-06-29T11:48:19
But that's OK, you were planning to throw the first version away anyway, right?:-)