Hillside Meditations

Laura Lemay reports a problem she had when using “tar”-syntax in the wrong order: “tar cvf reference.doc images questions.doc stuff.doc files.tar” killed her reference.doc and did not creare files.tar, of course. Pity!
I have made the same mistake several times. Computer (not only Unix) commands are mighty, but used falsely can lead to disastrous results.
I followed Laura´ s hint to link “rm” to a more reversible script, just to deal with another potentially harmful command (with a little help from my IRC-friends schoos and logix).
/home/cnrenner/bin/rm:

#!/bin/bash
mv "$*" ~/trash/

Unix, mistake, tar, rm, tech, argh

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 12:06 am and is filed under regular, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.