And another good reason to not work in root shells routinely. As damaging as something like this might still be, it will be confined to just one account if you are not running as root.
You need to have the following in /etc/sudoers in order to be truly protected by not being logged-in as root:
Defaults timestamp_timeout=0For most people who are not sysadmins losing ~ is much worse than losing /. Go ahead and wipe my OS, I just care for my photos to be safe.
It is a little more complicated than that, but the complications do not really affect very much. Last time I installed Debian around 2005 the documentation encouraged me to give /home its own partition, in which case rm -rf / will not get it. But on OS X the default is to put everything in one big partition and I kind get the feeling that Linux has moved that way, too. And even if /home is on its own partition, there are many ways for the malefactor to get /home, e.g., rm -rf /home.
They are effectively the same: an unknown script executing "rm -rf ~" with an unprivileged user is going to cause as much grief as root running "rm -rf /".
I couldn't care less that the system is still up if all my data is gone.
Also, I believe “rm -r” traverses mount points.