That Mini-Heart Attack

Published on Thursday, March 21 2019 • less than a minute read

Programmers feel one way or the other about the terminal. I, for one, embrace its ease of use, well, in certain cases. And of course, there are the many-many choices of shells available. I've gotten used to zsh and PowerShell Core. PowerShell runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and has a lot of .NET APIs I'm familiar with, and it's great. If you're using zsh, you should definitely consider installing oh-my-zsh So, whilst cleaning up some files from my home server to free up some space, I ran the rm command on a large folder by accident. You must be wondering, if one doesn't give the rf switches, what's the big deal? Well, I usually alias rm to rm -rf just to save the typing. And when I ran the command, it just finished without any errors, and I got a delayed sick feeling after realizing what I'd done. Also, one simply does not want to lose 300GB worth of data. I was cleaning up my DSLR photos folder and well, the whole thing, are you kidding me? So, the next command I ran:

$ alias rm

And I get the result:

rm=trash

And I'm like, "What is going on here?" Even though I've made some bad life choices, there are times where I have indeed thought things through. 😆 Turns out trash-cli is a tool I'd installed during the initial phases when I'd setup my server. And it was to help with issues like this, where I'd randomly deleted stuff without thinking. And am I glad that I'd installed it? Oh, wow. All the files get nested safely inside a .Trash folder. So, all I had to do was move the folder back to it's original location. What a relief.

$ tree .Trash -- 1000 |-- files -- info

And this was an installment of "Saurav screws up, again." �_