Jicksta.com

So it’s late at night and you’re up reading Slashdot while the source code for that program you thought seemed pretty cool so you’d check it out downloads.

Firefox tells you it’s finished downloading and you begin the old extract, configure, compile, install, run routine you’ve done a hundred times.

And then it happens.

Your neighbors, sleeping in bed, wake to your resounding shriek in the night:

“Ahhh!!! That tarball just crapped all over my home!”

Yes, it happened to you. Don’t feel bad. It’s the moron who didn’t pack his archive in a subfolder’s fault. There’s no way you could have known all those compressed files were going to mix with the dozens of files already in your home directory. No, really — don’t be so hard on yourself.

Potty-train your tarball and have it clean up its mess by typing this:

If rm starts giving you confirmation messages ad nauseam, add the letter f after the -r, but remember — if the tarball contained a subfolder with the same name as an existing folder in your home directory, removing the folder with -rf won’t discriminate between files inside it added by tar and files rightfully there. Careful!

Now to figure out how to change a baby’s diaper with piped Unix commands…