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up vote 3 down vote favorite

On my server rm always asks me for permission (even though I'm root) when I run it, on my desktop it does not. Like so:

$ rm mod_wsgi-3.3.tar.gz
rm: remove regular file `mod_wsgi-3.3.tar.gz'?

How do I make it stop prompting me?

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Maybe it is an alias. List the aliases with alias and remove the alias with unalias rm. – Marcelo Morales May 4 '11 at 18:24
Just remember that if you break your system, you get to keep both pieces. You might want to switch to something like trash-cli to give yourself an undo button for deletion. – Ryan Thompson May 4 '11 at 18:59
@Ryan Thompson - That seems handy, thanks. :) – Kit Sunde May 4 '11 at 19:11

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I would check if your rm is an alias. Typing alias at the command line you will see all defined aliases. I expect something like

alias rm='rm -i'

If so, it is probable that it is in ~/.bashrc, so you can change that thing editing the file.

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I consider it wiser to leave this as is and always use rm (-i due to the alias) and when prompted either type yes or ctrl-c and than do a rm -f. Safety first: I borked a complete system using rm where it did not have -i cuz someone else removed it from aliases (otherwise I would have spotted my mistake :D ). – Rinzwind May 4 '11 at 18:57
@Rinzwind - You are probably right, but I'm not overly worried about borking my server system in this case. It's stateless and I have setup script to restore it. I did however once remove half the PHP libs from my system through a badly typed rm, but I find it less annoying to do a big cleanup once, than small things all the time. – Kit Sunde May 4 '11 at 19:14
up vote 3 down vote

rm -f mod_wsgi-3.3.tar.gz

WARNING: use with caution.

From the man page:

-f, --force ignore nonexistent files, never prompt
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