unbelievably stupid mistake - i broke /usr/lib need help

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 13:19 -0700, Robin Laing wrote:
> The first thing I usually do is make an aliases for rm, cp and mv to 
> ask for confirmation.
> 
> alias rm='rm -i'
> alias cp='cp -i --backup=t'
> alias mv='mv -i --backup=t'

I think this is bad practice. When you have this setup, you can get in
the habit of rm etc. asking about deletions, which can lead to the habit
of not listing carefully on the command line the list of items to be
deleted. This can then be a problem if you're using a system on which
this alias isn't present, or if an error has been made further up the
~/.bashrc (or wherever) causing the alias not to be set - the
confirmation prompts don't happen and by the time you've realised what's
happened it can be too late.

Paul.