Last week, I accidentally deleted my files. I'm very happy that those were not extremely important ones. But that taught me a big lesson. Now, I saw this post. I found this trick very helpful.

But most HNers probably know this and are using it or something better. I wanted to share in case it's valuable for someone out there.

Consider

  mv -t /tmp FILE ...

to defer the irreversible operation until some time outside your current flow of task-directed thought. Zero-copy, therefore fast, provided you're working within the root filesystem. Recovery from /tmp is only a slight hassle (use the metadata mod time).