Shell

There are many things that can be done to customize and extend the behavior of your command shell, and modern Linux distros provide a large number of these activated by default: from handy aliases and colorized output settings to command line completion and new command installation.

But what if you don’t want all those extra settings/extensions? What if you want to exert a finer control of such things yourself? Here is a method of granting such control to you and your users on a per-user, opt-in basis.

I always cringe when I see a user — or worse, a system default — that has a shell alias of rm = 'rm -i'. Why? Because I consider this a very dangerous thing to do.