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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

For me, it was when I meant to execute this...

    rm -rf ~/foo

... but executed this instead:

    rm -rf ~ /foo

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My worst data loss was:

    $ tar cvfz mbox outbox mbox.tar.gz

The argument order is backwards -- the output file is supposed to be first, then the input files.

On my system, this overwrote my full mailbox with a gzipped copy of my outbox, and a complaint that the mbox.tar.gz input file didn't exist.

That's right, the worst data loss happened while I was trying to take a backup. :(

What were you trying to do? What's the outbox argument for?

He was trying to backup his mbox and outbox.

I did the Windows equivalent once a long time ago (I think it's deltree?) and I did it on a university computer system. It cleared out a TON of files and the computer itself pretty much stopped working. I had to hard turn it off.

Fortunately the University was using some tool that can re-image a computer each time it boots before hitting Windows so starting it back up and all the deleted system and application files were back.

Probably Ghost server, that's why schools do this.

this is the reason why I always use quotes before specifying folders with rf -rf :)

I always type

ls /stuff/wherever/*

Then examine the output to see if that is the stuff I really want to delete and if it is,

up-arrow Ctrl-A right right backspace backspace rm -rf enter

Never deleted the wrong stuff again in 30 years of doing that

I always cd to the parent directory, ls with tab complete to check, the rm with the same tab complete.

Something else that is really useful in these situations (in bash at least) is alt-* (alt-shift-8). It will expand a directory or glob into all effected top level files/directories.

For example, it will expand `ls *` to `ls foo bar baz`, etc

Great tip, thanks!

For me it was a simple `rm -rf .`. Thought I was in ~/somefolder/, was actually in ~...

I stopped it after about 3 seconds, but that was enough to do critical damage.

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