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2021-03-14

Sometimes I'm just a moron

tags: data

So I did it again.

Allthough --- the last time I remember this for sure, was before 1993 :) So maybe it's not all that bad.

What I did? Easy:

rm -f *.org

And it did, what I asked for. However, it had escaped my mind that seconds before that I did

cd ..

and the shell was not in the same directory as my mind. Duh.

Being through systems administration for too long, I had internalized pretty much the following sequence of key presses. First do an exact ls of what you want to delete. Then press

[Ctrl][p]  to repeat the ls command
[Ctrl][a]  to move the cursor to the beginning of the ls command
[Ctrl][d]  a couple of times to remove the ls command possibly including options
[r][m][space][-][f][r] to create the appropriate rm command, possibly with other options
[Return]

but please /never/ change the argument list.

Not being in systems administration any more, this habit has obviously faded too much. --- Well, it's back now.

But was ist so bad?

Looking at this four days later:

I made an experiment with extundelete, but failed miserably
I lost only 4 days worth of personal journaling, really nothing that would save the world at large.
I lost only 4 days worth of personal journaling, and not like 2 years or something such.

But what if I had lost 2 years or even everything? Think about it for a minute ... ok, losing appointment data would have been a bit of a hassle, but other than that? I could just forget the old stuff and start from scratch, couldn't I? So just maybe I missed the opportunity to get rid of some clutter in my life.

Cheers,

~ew

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