Tried to rm -r my .cache but accidentally did .config instead...

I should’ve […] used trash

For those who don’t know: trash-cli

It upsets me to no end that this isn't a standard package 😭
What an awesome tool that I wish I knew sooner. Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.
- Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.
  
  I'm guessing something like... Copy file/dir from location A to location B and then delete from A, but the copy had failed (and the delete unfortunately worked fine)?

I’m a complete moron,

You are not,
Every person learning with the hardway isnt a moron,

You have to do, to really learn,

If you do it again though...
- 🫢 🤷‍♀️ I would say, that depend the personnal situation,
  
  But i think, OP learned :)

Here's a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:

If you type "rm", take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
If you then type "-r", do it again.
If you then type "-f" do it again.
In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.

I'm a big fan of starting the command with a #, then removing it once I'm happy with the command to defend against accidentally hitting enter

Putting ~ next to the enter key on keyboards (at least UK ones) was an evil villain level decision
- When I'm unsure, I ls <the-glob>, chek, then replace ls with rm.
- I really like this # idea. I've also taken to holding off on adding sudo when deleting privileged files
- I never thought of doing that in 40 years. It's a great idea actually. Thanks!
Or have backups (lol)
- AND have backups.
-i doesn't exist?
Also, triple-check which machine you're actually logged into.

if your session is still running you can use env to help reconstruct it

I once had a directory in /tmp called etc which contained subdirectories for something I was migrating.

I thought that I was in /tmp when I ran rm -rf etc... I was actually in /

That's why I always:

cd .cache
ls
rm -r *

Type a space before rm to prevent it from being added to your history to be a extra careful.
- Holy shit, I never knew you could do that! I've always really wanted a feature to stop random commands from being added to my history.
- For which shell? I just tried that on a bash system and the command was still stored in .bash_history 😔
rm -r *

Also, if you have to type that, don't use the numpad: / is only one key away from *. If you finger snags the / key on its way to * and you happen to be root, your root partition will go bye-bye.

Tipps to prevent future accidents:

Set up BTRFS snapshots with Timeshift or Snapper. Switching to BTRFS is worth it for snapshots alone.
Do regular backups on a device that can not be reached by rm: vorta local on external hdd that you connect once a week OR vorta/borg2 to a NAS/Server that does BTRFS snapshots itself OR Nextcloud to sync to a server that has a trashbin OR git to a server. Just remember that Nextcloud and git are unencrypted, so the server has to be secure and trustworthy. Vorta and borg2 can be set up with encryption.

Mistakes are unpreventable due to our error-prone brains, but it is a choice to repeat them.

ZFS and dotfiles are your friend. Sorry for your loss.

You're just the latest member of a long and storied fraternity of the best worst operating system architecture.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

One of us...

Sorry for your loss. I did something similar recently. A script was creating a "~" folder in my notes folder. I wanted to delete it... Thankfully it stopped at some file it couldn't remove and my dotfiles are in git.

Reason's I never use auto-complete in the terminal. Sadly, that's sometimes not enough.

just be careful and review what tab-suggest shows.

I've started adopting the habit of putting "-rf" as the last argument to avoid accidentally deleting something before I've double-checked my input. Good luck, and may this never happen again.

I do exactly the same. It's not foolproof but it's better than nothing. I remember, almost a decade ago, when I discovered that rm on mac didn't accept flags as last arguments... I hope they changed that behavior

I should’ve had that backed up

Absolutely! IT's time to check out Stow now. With this you can easily manage your configuration and dotfiles (and all other data) in a single location.

https://venthur.de/2021-12-19-managing-dotfiles-with-stow.html

womp womp

But... why?

I was in a rush to free up space. Rust's binary sized can be really huge and they were taking up like 20GB at the time, but I was unaware of this.

Can you say why were you trying to rm -r your .cache anyway? Also RIP.

Save space probably
- Yeah my system was running out of space and I wanted to free a bit quickly. Turns out the issue was Rust building 20GB of binaries and I should have deleted those instead.
Probably the number one cause of borked Linux systems - trying to "de-bloat".

Use nix home-manager or guix home and put your configs in a git repo (this is my guix home config for reference)

That's very helpful now. You have added nothing other than to pull the declarative distro equivalent of "I use Arch, BTW" And then link your literal code. For shame. For shame.
- nix/guix can be used on any distro and it provides a way to organize .config files so that if the .config directory gets deleted or accidentally modified for some reason, restoring it would be very easy. By putting the configuration in a git repo, it also makes it easy to restore previous configurations. I accidentally deleted a bunch of stuff in my .config directory once and that's one of the reason I use this tooling now, so I thought OP would find it helpful also

i have rm aliased to rm -i, it's basically the closest to PowerShell's -WhatIfthat a posix shell gets