Mental note
This should be obvious after you think of it, but it is a honest mistake and cleaning up the mess afterwards can cause you big problems, so here it is:
Running
some_command --base=~/Sites/dir
is very different fromsome_command --base ~/Sites/dir
The extra =
makes all the difference. With it, the ~/
is not expanded to your $HOME
by the bash shell, so if your some_command
uses that path as a base directory, you'll end up with a new path like ./~/Sites/dir
.
This means that in your current working directory, you'll have a subdirectory named ~
, and you might be tempted to just rm -rf ~
to clean it up...
I think that we can all agree that a rm -rf ~
command would be disastrous (the correct command would be rm -rf ./~
), so please be careful when using options with parameters. The =
will disable shell expansion, and you could end up in a bad place.