[unwind]

That's normal, but why the trailing slash?! That's just pointless, and almost looks like an explicit deathtrap.

Without the slash, an empty variable would result in a command line of "rf -rf" which would simply fail due to the missing argument.

There is absolutely no need for having a trailing slash, it's not as if "rf -rf foo" and "rm -rf foo/" can ever mean two different things, there can be only one "foo" in the file system after all.

Very interesting way of introducing an epic fail with a single character, that really looks harmless.

[riquito]

> it's not as if "rf -rf foo" and "rm -rf foo/" can ever mean two different things

That's true, but the original code was akin "rm -rf foo/*" and that's different, since it removes the content of the directory while preserving it.

[teddyh]

I have observed that ,any people feel that directories “need” to have a slash appended to them. They are afraid of ever doing, e.g. “cd /foo/bar” and will always do “cd /foo/bar/”. I”m guessing they feel like it would be some sort of type error, like treating a directory like a file or something.

This behavior is especially common with regards to URLs; there are many flamewars about whether URLs “need” a trailing slash or not.

[pixelbeat]

The trailing /* is to delete the directory _contents_ rather than the dir itself. It would be safer to receate the dir as then you can possibly hit some of the inbuilt rm protections