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My favourite is editing crontab (the scheduler on Linux). It's -e to edit the file, -r to delete all content from it with no confirmation dialogue or anything.

My favourite is editing crontab (the scheduler on Linux). It's -e to edit the file, -r to delete all content from it with no confirmation dialogue or anything. I fell for that twice already. I can't imagine how often you need to delete everything from a file without using a text editor. I'm sure it's not that common that you need to give it a one-letter flag (instead of --remove or --delete) and put it right next to the fucking edit flag.

marcosdumay 6y ago
Or no flag at tall to replace it entirely with the stdin contents. How many commands are there that completely destroy all the data they can access if you call them without parameters? I really wonder if there is any script on any distro that uses this behavior. Most distros did go into the sane "let's split the crontab into many files" option.