But that doesn't actually exist by default, and so it's not a good example.

A better example is that `/` is a special case for `rm`.

(Besides: I'm not a fan of `rm -i`, precisely because it's non-default. You'll get used to it, and then someday you accidentally some files on a system where you didn't add the alias.)

Lots of GNU/Linux distributions used to it by default, has it changed?

None I currently use (just tested with bash* on: Debian, Centos, Fedora, OpenWRT) or have used in the past few years (Arch) has it.

I don't remember anything about my time with SUSE and Ubuntu, thats way back.

* I normally use zsh with grmlzshrc and nearly no customization (which is why I love grmlzshrc -- usable defaults), which warns for `rm -rf foo/*` but not for `rm -rf foo`.

Redhat based distros absolutely do enable alias rm='rm -i' out of the box, but only for the root user. As a career SysAdmin, that seems like a good compromise. If you want to take the safety net off, you can escape out the alias (or any alias) with a slash i.e.:

\rm -rf somedir

Yet by default, if you don't include the "\", you get rm -i

You're right about RedHat, sorry.

.bash_history says I accidentally added `-f` on that host. I should have just checked with `which` instead of trying it out. Oops.

Actually even if you do rm -f, the -i will still be added if it is an alias. Better is to use the bash builtin "type":

type rm is better than which rm, but it depends on what distro you're using. Some distros (Just checked on RHEL7) will fancify which as well ie:

$ type which which is aliased to `alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'

> Actually even if you do rm -f, the -i will still be added if it is an alias.

Yes, I know, but rm ignores -i if -f is given.

  [root@example ~]# touch blah
  [root@example ~]# rm -i -f blah
  [root@example ~]# 

And hence:

  [root@example ~]# which rm
  alias rm='rm -i'
  	/usr/bin/rm
  [root@example ~]# touch blah
  [root@example ~]# rm -f blah
  [root@example ~]#

@type: yes, you're right, thanks for the reminder.

Maybe I am wrong but I think Red-Hat, Mandrake and SuSE used to do it.

Nowadays I spend most of my time in Windows and mobile OSes to remember it properly.

Sane distributions don't include that alias by default. Because otherwise people will always use `rm -f` and lose the feature that `rm` asks before removing files marked as read-only.

Then quite a few distributions are not sane, as I remember once a upon a time it was quite common to have it like that on fresh install.