On Sat, 18 May 2013, elhaddi wrote: > The worst one for me was: > > \rm -fr /home > > That was in 1988 on a sun 280 and of course the aliased rm was useless > to me :( Right, because the backslash turns off the alias. I can see why you remember it 25 years later. What I did was very similar but perhaps different in an important way. I had no alias on rm and I had done this: cd /home rm -rf * The difference I am wondering about is how the command responds to ctrl-c. For me, it looks like it deleted some directories and left others completely untouched. The "*" glob expands to a list of directory names, so I suspect the ctrl-c breaks the command after it finishes on the current filename argument. Thus, I think ctrl-c might not stop "rm -rf /home" until it is done. I also don't think we can recover deleted files in ext3 filesystem (what I'm using). Mike