Question

So we have an alias that does:

alias doIt='cd somedir; rm -rf *'

What we want is for the command to fail immediately if, for example, somedir does not exist. This protects us from getting the rm -rf bomb in an inconvienient location.
Is something like this possible? If not, is there another way?:

alias doIt='set -e; cd somedir; rm -rf *'

Answer 1

alias doit='cd somedir && rm -rf *'

the rm -rf * won’t be executed if cd somedir fails.