[mbroshi]

I love this post. This sort of thing happens to everyone, most people just are not willing to be so open about it.

I was once sshed to the production server, and was cleaning up some old files that got created by an errant script, one which file was '~'. So, to clean it up, I type `rm -rf ~`.

[meowface]

Somewhat similar story from many years ago. Was in ~/somedirectory, wanted to clear the contents, ran `rm -rf *`. Turns out somewhere in between I had done a `cd ..`, but I thought I was still in the child directory. Fastest Ctrl+C ever once I saw some permission errors, but most of the home directory was wiped in that second or two.

Didn't have a backup of it unfortunately, though thankfully there wasn't anything too critical in there. Mostly just lost a bunch of utility scripts and dotfiles. I feel like it's beneficial in the long run for everyone to make a mistake like this once early on in their career.

[wruza]

It would be beneficial for `rm` to have a way for making `trash` mode the default mode of operation. Unix shell is prone to errors like this beyond all reason. And nobody would die typing:

  fs.delete(shell.expand('*'), recursive:yes)
  fs.undo()

or something like that with completion helpers. Our instruments usually lack any safety in general, and making them safe is hard, especially when you're just a worker and not a safety expert. All the world today benefits from mistake-friendly software, except for developers who constantly walk on ui minefields.