William

On Ubuntu with the Bourne again (BASH) shell I'm trying to force it to always use the -i flag with the rm command (so I can type "rm" but it will treat it as "rm -i" was typed.) The -i flag makes it so that you are promted before each removal of a file so I can cancel if I make a mistake. My problem is that I know this SHOULD be possible, but I'm not sure where I'm going wrong.

What I have done so far is changed my .profile file so it makes my $PATH have my /home/userprofile/bin folder as the first in the list. To specify, after logging in "echo $PATH" gives me

"/home/userprofile/bin:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games".

Next, I created that bin folder and made a file named "rm". Inside the file I put:

#!/bin/sh

/bin/rm -i "$@"

which I believe will explicitly call rm with the -i flag and then all the arguments from the terminal parsed as seperate strings. After all that and ensuring it is executable, whenever I use rm it deletes multiple files without asking each time, but if I rename the file to anything else and call it, it does EXACTLY what I want it to. I believe the system is automatically jumping to the /bin in the root besides the fact I want it to search my bin folder first but I have no idea how to change this behaviour and I have had no luck searching around the internet. I know I could just use a different name, but the point is that I want anyone using the computer to have this benefit without having to call a different name because they may-as-well just put the -i flag in that case.