[Twirrim]

I've biased towards this heavily in the last 8 or so years now.

I've yet to have anyone mistakenly modify anything when they need to pass --commit, when I've repeatedly had people repeatedly accidentally modify stuff because they forgot --dry-run.

[IgorPartola]

I wouldn’t want most things to work this way:

    $ rm file.bin
    $ rm —-commit file.bin
    $ cat foo.txt > bar.txt
    $ cat foo.txt | tee —-write-for-real bar.txt
    $ cp balm.mp3 pow.mp3
    $ cp —-i-mean-it balm.mp3 pow.mp3

There is a time and a place for it but it should not be the majority of use cases.

[Darfk]

Totally agree it shouldn't be for basic tools; but if I'm ever developing a script that performs any kind of logic before reaching out to a DB or vendor API and modifies 100k user records, creating a flag to just verify the sanity of the logic is a necessity.

[digiown]

For most of these local data manipulation type of commands, I'd rather just have them behave dangerously, and rely on filesystems snapshots to rollback when needed. With modern filesystems like zfs or btrfs, you can take a full snapshot every minute and keep it for a while to negate the damage done by almost all of these scripts. They double as a backup solution too.

[ronjakoi]

I used to have alias rm='rm -i' for a few years to be careful, but I took it out once I realised that I had just begun adding -f all the time

[hdjrudni]

Even in those basic examples, it probably would be useful. `cp` to a blank file? No problem. `cp` over an existing file? Yeah, I want to be warned.

`rm` a single file? Fine. `rm /`? Maybe block that one.

[Mawr]

Uhuh:

    $ rm -rf /

    rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
    rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

[__turbobrew__]

—dry-run should default to true

[fainpul]

In PowerShell there's a setting for this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...