Utilizing Aliases and Interactive Mode to Force Users to Think Twice Before Deleting Files

I previously mentioned that I lost my file by accidentally overwriting my file using the cp command. This got me thinking as to why this would be impossible on my work laptop since I would be constantly bombarded with a prompt to confirm my intention to overwrite the file.

$ cp 2024-12-01-template.md 2024-12-30-alias-interactive.md
cp: overwrite '2024-12-30-alias-interactive.md'?

Commands like mv and cp have an interactive flag -i to prompt before overwriting the file. As seen in man 1 cp

-i, --interactive
              prompt before overwrite (overrides a previous -n option)

To force everyone at work to have this flag enabled, they made cp and mv an alias in our default shell configs:

alias cp="cp -i"
alias mv="mv -i"

Which you can also verify using the type command:

$ type cp
cp is aliased to `cp -i'
$ type mv
mv is aliased to `mv -i'