== Another little sysadmin twitch or two

One of my [[little sysadmin twitches ASysadminTwitch]] is that when I am
using _mv_ to move things into a different directory, I try to always
write it as:

> _mv foo bar~~/~~_

(Note the the trailing slash on the directory.)

This is a safety measure: if I typo the directory name, _mv_ will error
out with a no-such-directory error message instead of renaming the file
to 'br' or the like. Speaking from personal experience, tracking down
just what happened to your file when you make this mistake and don't
notice right away is immensely frustratingly difficult.

(The difficulty is compounded by two of my habits: my shell history is
per-shell, not global, and I discard shells/windows once I'm done with
the particular thing I was using them for, which of course destroys
that shell's history. Thus if I typo the _mv_ and don't notice before
I discard the shell, the history that would let me back up and see the
typo vanishes.)

Of course I am also a strange mutant who *likes* having rm, mv, and cp
aliased so that they have '_-i_' on. (My personal aliases for them turn
off this behavior if I explicitly use '_-f_', so that things like '_rm
-rf blah_' are not annoying.)

(As an aside, the habit of advising new sysadmins that they should
on no account do this for their own accounts because they'll screw
themselves up when they work as root or whatever without it has always
struck me as an exercise in masochism. The right solution is to fix your
root environment so that it *also* has things set this way. Nor is it
terribly difficult to arrange for different people to have different
root environments in most situations, to accommodate co-workers with
different preferences.)