Each trade has a tool that masters in that trade wield most often. For many sysadmins, that tool is their shell[1]. On the majority of Linux and other Unix-like systems out there, the default shell is Bash.
Bash is a fairly old program—it originated in the late 1980s—but it builds on much, much older shells, like the C shell (csh[2]), which is easily 10 years its senior. Because the concept of a shell is that old, there is an enormous amount of arcane knowledge out there waiting to be consumed to make any sysadmin guy's or gal's life a lot easier.
Let's take a look at some of the basics.
Who has, at some point, unintentionally ran a command as root and caused some kind of issue? raises handI'm pretty sure a lot of us have been that guy or gal at one point. Very painful. Here are some very simple tricks to prevent you from hitting that stone a second time.
Use aliases
First, set up aliases for commands like mv and rm that point to mv -I and rm -I. This will make sure that running rm -f /boot at least asks you for confirmation. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, these aliases are set up by default if you use the root account.
If you want to set those aliases for your normal user account as well, just drop these two lines into a file called .bashrc in your home directory (these will also work with sudo):
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'