Gruber: Today's command line isn't dangerous, just convenient

Don't wanna get all Unix-macho here, but the regular command line is also pretty safe when you're just launching applications and doing things equivalent to the location bar. It gets dangerous for only a specific subset of administrative commands such as rm, mv, apt- which provide different functionality anyway.

That said. you can get burnt clobbering important files with output redirection. It's a good idea to enable the "noclobbler" setting in Bash like so:

  set -o noclobber

It's saved me plenty of times from deleting important partially process data.

The new ones aren't dangerous because you can't actually do anything with them. As soon as I can send an email (or affect the outside world in any way) from the location bar, it becomes just as dangerous as the unix command line.

you can pry bash from my cold, dead hands.