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