Git repos have lots of write protected files in the .git directory, sometimes hundreds, and the default rm my_project_managed_by_git will prompt before deleting each write protected file. So, to actually delete my project I have to do rm -rf my_project_managed_by_git.

Using rm -rf scares me. Is there a reasonable way to delete git repos without it?

    • Buttons@programming.devOPEnglish
      72·
      2 months ago

      That’s a good example. If I’m regularly running a command that is a single whitespace character away from disaster, that’s a problem.

      Imagine a fighter aircraft that had an eject button on the side of the flight stick. The pilot complains “I’m afraid I might accidentally hit the eject button when I don’t need to”, but everyone responds “why would you push the eject button if you don’t want to eject?”, or “so your concern is that the eject button will cause you to eject…?” – That’s how I feel right now.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I understand the mindset you have, but trust me, you’ll learn (sooner or later) a habit to pause and check your command before hitting enter. For some it takes a bit longer and it’ll bite you in the butt for few times (so have backups), but everyone has gone down that path and everyone has fixed their mistakes now and then. If you want hard (and fast) way to learn to confirm your commands, use dd a lot ;)

        One way to make it a bit less scary is to ‘mv <thing you want removed> /tmp’ and when you confirmed that nothing extra got removed you can ‘cd /tmp; rm -rf <thing>’, but that still includes the ‘rm -rf’ part.