Do this in important directories for added safety: $ touch -- - i This creates a file called "-i" which will add the interactive flag, prompting you before deleting every file that rm was going to delete.

That seems flaky at best. Basically you rely on "*" expansion to inject the -i.

While that may work for `rm -rf *`, it won't for `rm -rf foo/*`, `rm -rf foo`, etc

That's the point. You're not relying on it, it's a safety to save yourself from an unintended glob expansion.

Or for far better reliability, just use safety and add that to the config.

Agreed. I like that you need to use '-r' ... it's that extra layer of safety and intention. A whole directory gone is a bit hard to recover from.

A way better solution is to alias trash-d as a drop-in replacement for `rm` : https://github.com/rushsteve1/trash-d

Also, ‘gio trash’ is widespread.

Never heard of it before, let's man gio :

    gio is a utility that makes many of the GIO features available

Ok, thanks I guess :D

What I mean is: a precept of command-line fluency is to be able to drop onto arbitrary systems and change them in ways predictable to the next sysadmin. ‘gio’ is a vague entry point to a library, and even if the next sysadmin doesn’t know about gnome, the files you trashed end up in a common recycling bin.

On the other hand, KDE has a syntax that deserves an alias.

Agree. (I actually feel the same way about aliasing rm to “rm -i“).

I depend on the out of box behavior of rm. I’ll run “rm *” in a directory that has subdirectories I want to preserve, but where I want to erase the files.