[UserNameGoesHere]

Originally Posted by qqwref

Why didn't you use the up arrow (or similar) to copy the command you previously used? That should make it very hard to make a mistake like this.

With a bunch of miscellaneous commands, it's usually easier to just type stuff out than search through command history unless it's a particularly involved command (lots of options used/etc...)

Again, more force of habit. I would be issuing other commands in the between time and don't really feel like sifting 5 to 10 commands back to find what I want when it's easy enough to just type it out. That said, costly typo. :-P

One other thing I could do though to avoid this particular problem in the future is just allow the default name of a.out for the executable, for testing purposes, and only rename it once finished. It'd be pretty hard to accidentally delete a source code file that looks nothing like "a.out" and if I tried to remove a.out.c that file wouldn't exist and wouldn't matter.