"Keep the data safe
Using rm -rf * or its variants at the shell prompt is probably the most common source of several lost work hours for a UNIX developer. There are several ways to help in this cause—alias rm, alias cp, or alias mv to their interactive variants in $HOME/.aliases, then source this file during system startup. Depending on the login shell, this could mean putting source $HOME/.aliases inside .cshrc (for C/tcsh shells) or in .profile or .bash_profile (for the Bourne shell), as shown in Listing 1.
"Listing 1. Setting aliases for rm, cp, and mv
alias rm 'rm –i'
alias cp 'cp –i'
alias mv 'mv –i'"
