Once upon a time, I accidentally created a folder named “~” in my home folder (the company provided scripting framework would inconsistently expand variables, so the folder had a ton of stuff inside it).

I ran “rm -rf ~” and only panicked when I started to wonder why it wasn’t taking too long.

Good news is that it only managed to get halfway through my local checkout of aosp before I stopped it. Bad news was that it nuked most of my dotfiles.

Why doesn’t rm -rf /* also require —no-preserve-root? That seems just as easy to type accidentally and will just nuke your system without asking