[smtddr]

fwiw, making those "-i" aliases to rm, mv and cp are one of the first things I do on any new Linux machine I'm on.

I don't understand how anyone works in the very unforgiving-of-accidental-delete *nix world without those aliases.

[jsnell]

The "rm -i" alias is a horrible, horrible idea. Red Hat has a lot of stupid defaults, but this is probably the most questionable one.

The useless confirmations on every deletion is so intrusive that people will instinctively try to work around it. In the best case they'll undefine those crappy aliases in their own shell config, or maybe gravitate toward writing /bin/rm rather than rm to avoid the alias expansion. In the bad case they'll learn that "rm -f" will override "rm -i", and get in the habit of using that to shut rm up. Too bad that "-f" does more than negate "-i"...

People who don't actively work to circumvent the braindamage will almost certainly end up reflexively teaching themselves to just answer "y" to the prompts without reading. Or worse, they'll learn to depend on the prompts being there, and doing "rm * " when their intent is not to remove everything. "Yeah, I'll just answer 'n' for the files I want to keep". That's going to be a really nasty surprise when they use a machine without that alias.

No. Just no. Don't do it.

The solution in zsh is much better. Warn for "rm * " (or "rm * .o", etc) no matter what, since that's both very dangerous and very rare. But don't waste the user's attention on every single deletion.

[smtddr]

Hmm. Well I guess it's just me then. I've been burned so many times by rm/mv/cp that I actually do always read their confirmations and give it a 2nd thought. I rarely delete files unless it's a mass delete or files & folders that I do "rm -rf". and I pretty much never intend for mv or cp to overwrite an existing file.

[semi-extrinsic]

zsh has a nice feature where rm is only interactive if you are deleting everything in a folder. Another safety feature I really like in zsh is to tab-expand wildcards, so I can check that it's not deleting anything it shouldn't.

[dietrichepp]

99% of the time, my terminal is open to a git repo, and -i would just be more noise. The other 1% of the time I add the alias or use Nemo.

[rdc12]

Frequent snapshots and backups (non-local)

[enneff]

With care.