You can use ls <PATH> first to check you are deleting the right files. I do this and I’ve never accidentally deleted the wrong files (using rm).

its a bit verbose but my preference is rm -r --interactive=never directoryname

i really try to avoid rf for myself

Maybe you can create a bash function (and add it to your bash config files) that only executes the rm -rf command we have a .git file around?

function git-rm {
  if [ -d "$1" ] && [ -d "$1/.git" ]
  then
    rm -rf $1;
  fi
}

The problem is that rm -rf shouldn’t scare you?

What are the chances something like

~/projects/some-project $ cd ..
~/projects $ rm -fr some-project

may delete unexpected stuff? (especially if you get into the habit of tab-completing the directory argument)

I’ve shot myself in the foot enough times over the years with rm -rf. Now I use trash-cli. I don’t know what package manager(s) you use, but I install it via Homebrew.

So… you’re afraid of the command that does the thing you’re trying to do?

If you’re scared to do rm -rf, do something else that lets you inspect the entire batch of deletions first. Such as:

find .git ! -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 echo rm -fv

This will print out all the rm -fv commands that would be run. Once you’ve verifid that that’s what you want to do, run it again without echo to do the actual deletion. If you’re scared of having that in your history, either use a full path for .git, or prepend a space to the non-echo version of the command to make it avoid showing up in your shell history (assuming you have ignorespace in your HISTCONTROL env var)

Cd into the directory first, then run rm -rf, then cd back out and rm -r just the directory.

git rebase doesn’t work?

You should have backups. Preferably also snapshots. Then rm will feel less scary.

chmod -R 777 my_project_managed_by_git && rm -r my_project_managed_by_git

If you’re nervous about rm, there’s many alternatives that work by moving a file to your recycling bin instead of deleting it outright. I think the current fun one is trash-rs, but some distros package trash-cli.