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How to copy, move and delete files in your shell the safe way

If you copy, move or remove files in the shell using cp, mv and rm you don’t get a confirmation for your action. This can be a awfully bad thing if you happen to make a mistake like slipping on a key and accidentally deleting the wrong file. No ones want that.

There’s a pretty simple way to prevent an accident like that, and that’s using the flag -i, --interactive with those commands. It will then ask for your confirmation every time you’re about to overwrite or delete files:

Move:

$ mv -i dog.txt cat.txt
mv: overwrite 'cat.txt'?

Copy:

$ cp -i cat.txt dog.txt
cp: overwrite 'dog.txt'?

Delete:

$ rm -i *
zsh: sure you want to delete all 2 files in /home/johan/test [yn]?

This flag has actually saved me a few times. I highly recommend adding aliases for them so you never forget to use the flags:

alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='mv -i'

By default, rm will ask for confirmation for every single file, if you batch delete files and only want to confirm once, you can change the flag to a capital “i” like this: -I. It will then only ask you when you remove three files or more and when you’re removing files and folders recursively.