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Yeah I had the habit of using shift too, until I configured konqueror to ignore shift+delete, and I got rid of that crappy habit

But yeah from the command-line, either you have alias rm="rm -i" or you really do have to be careful.

When did that become a nasty habit? I have never deleted a file I didn't want to and I'd rather that than having files I don't need piling up in a system folder. And there never is enough disk space to forget about the "recycled" stuff.
In the nineties it was the "Word" files, in the 00s it was the mp3s, now it is 4Gb DVD images or rips, or in my case 10Gb virtual machine drives - they somehow always manage to fill up your disk drive whatever its size.

Couldn't you set up a bash alias or function where rm is actually mv?

http://freshmeat.net/projects/ext3undel/

Put the following into your .bashrc and .bash_profile files:

PS1="\u@\h:\w> "
export PS1
alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
set -o noclobber

The first two lines will set your command line prompt to show you which directory you are in. No more need for the "pwd" command.

The three "alias" lines will for you to confirm with a yes/no prompt before deleting, copying or moving a file.

The "noclobber" line will prevent you from overwriting an existing file. If you want to overwrite a file, you'll have to manually delete the old one first.

Of course, you have to logout/login one time for these settings to take effect, because that restarts the bash shell.

I didn't know about noclobber. I may use that. But, the "-i" stuff just gets on my nerves.

Here's a tip for you. You don't have to log out to reread the dot files. All you need to do is at the command prompt: ". .profile". For clarification, at the command prompt, type a "dot" followed by a "space" followed by the name of the hidden resource file you wish to reread.

I just "source ~/.bashrc" which should source everything that normally gets sourced when you log in.