Re: helper function that should take a list argument doesn't do anything

[Janek Warchoł]

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Thomas Morley
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 2012/11/9 Janek Warchoł <address@hidden>:
>> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 9:21 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> [...)
>> Sorry for being grumpy - i'm frustrated with some other things, for
>> example the fact that all my data got deleted because of a script bug,
>> and the fact that the behaviour of 'rm' makes it very difficult to
>> recover anything.
>
> OUCH!!
>
> No idea what to do, but I wish the best.

I had a 2-week old backup, and i managed to recover some files created
after the backup (unfortunately it seems that SSD drives fragment the
data heavily, and it makes recovery difficult).

What really annoys me is the fact that rm has no reasonable safeguard.
 Using rm -i (prompts before every removal) is really not an option,
especially for using with scripts - it's too annoying when you're
asked for confirmation every time.  What i'd like to see is a
safeguard only against deleting too many files, for example:
- ask for confirmation when attempting to delete more than 10000 files
- ask for confirmation when attempting to delete more than 10 GB of data
or even better, make numbers above customizable.  How come no one had
this idea before?  Maybe it's worth suggesting it to people
responsible for coreutils?


On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 10:31 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> But nevertheless, thanks for your explanations; i do appreciate them.
>> Sorry for being grumpy - i'm frustrated with some other things, for
>> example the fact that all my data got deleted because of a script bug,
>
> Checking into git occasionally makes things easier.

I was thinking about having all my files in a git repository, but
that's ~10 GB of data, and lots of it is in a binary (i mean,
non-diffable) form.  Do you think it would make sense to use git for
that?

>> and the fact that the behaviour of 'rm' makes it very difficult to
>> recover anything.
>
> touch ./-i
>
> is a trick from old times that helps against things like writing
>
> rm * .o

umm, what does it do? i don't see -i among available options of
'touch', and i don't quite see how changing filestamps could help
against 'rm *' typo.

thanks,
Janek