[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“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'”