It's more likely they wanted to remove all hidden directories from their home directory, and ran `rm -rf .*`.
Under some shells (eg bash) that will expand to include `..` and `.`.
Under some shells (eg bash) that will expand to include `..` and `.`.
Hopefully, it was not at the root directory and we have frequent snapshots.
Edit: What would have been much more worse, if I had done it, would have been
rm -rf ~ /foo
rm -rf ~/foo rm -rf /usr /lib/modules/something/somethinghttps://www.wired.com/2001/11/glitch-in-itunes-deletes-drive...
You can use the `Pathname` class to treat paths as objects, which you can concatenate only valid paths with. Aside from obviously all the other sanity-saving features.
I'd love to see someone deploy a Python or Ruby-based shell. I'm sure these are available, but they're not widely used.
And I'm quite happy not having shell use hold back evolution of Ruby or Python, and not having drama like Ruby 1.8 -> 1.9 or Python 2.x -> 3.x affecting shell use.