… after having pacman -Rncsed awk without a second thought last night. -R remove, -n configs also, -c dependencies too, -s recursively: initscripts went along. i noticed the problem in time and pacman -Syed initscripts again… being distracted with something else, i forgot the problem and, this morning, i had no login…

i have an archlinux installer as my recovery system. i plugged it in, booted from it, chrooted to the disk, changed the password, reconfigured rc.conf, updated the user and here i am, straight up, ready to another…

the problem with -Rncs is that, with time, people tend to not look at the dependencies… a few months ago i wanted my rm commands safe, so i aliased it to interactive. not too much later i figured that removing directories (lots of files) that way was a pain in the ass, so i came up with rmf, an alias for a more powerfull rm… after a while i didn’t use rm any more, only rmf: school project down the drain!

i didn’t manage to recover it from the filesystem, i did manage to recover the project but some coding was required again. these days rm is a function that prints whatever is being removed and requires me to input “yes” in order to confirm… to date i haven’t typed the word by mistake, but when that is close to happen i’ll choose a more complicated work…

everyone has been through a similar situation. we get so much used to the cues that keep us from making mistakes that we end up ignoring them. next week i’m supposed to give a 10 minute talk about based on an article by ratwani, mccurry and trafton, where they acknowledge the same situation but plan on solving only postcompletion errors — by analising user’s eye movements!