Gruber: Today's command line isn't dangerous, just convenient(daringfireball.net)

10 pointsby ams117 lat temu6 comments

Gruber: Today's command line isn't dangerous, just convenient

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/05/12/atwood-location-field

3 comments

mustpax17 lat temu

Don't wanna get all Unix-macho here, but the regular command line is also pretty safe when you're just launching applications and doing things equivalent to the location bar. It gets dangerous for only a specific subset of administrative commands such as rm, mv, apt- which provide different functionality anyway.

That said. you can get burnt clobbering important files with output redirection. It's a good idea to enable the "noclobbler" setting in Bash like so:

  set -o noclobber

It's saved me plenty of times from deleting important partially process data.

ericwaller17 lat temu

The new ones aren't dangerous because you can't actually do anything with them. As soon as I can send an email (or affect the outside world in any way) from the location bar, it becomes just as dangerous as the unix command line.

bazbarfoo17 lat temu

  cd /
  rm *

essentially renders your machine useless. Surely it would be easy to make it less dangerous than this.

ericwaller17 lat temu

Of course it would be, my point is that less dangerous necessarily means less powerful. Though I'd agree that there are cases where the trade off is desirable, like `rm -rf /`.

benreesman17 lat temu

you can pry bash from my cold, dead hands.

pookleblinky17 lat temu

Try taking zsh away from me and my cold, dead jaw will reanimate and seek your throat.