I fell for a similar (but less) obvious joke on my first Linux installation back in 1995. That one used dd instead of rm. I lost a lot of code that I had written. After that, I’ve failed to see the humor in this kind of joke. There’s always the risk that someone new doesn’t understand it’s a joke, and tries it out.
I agree. The / directory may receive special considerations, and it may be extra protected, but once I was doing something with rm -r and …/* in some folder inside my home directory… it wasn’t fun.
No, I did not have to learn that the hard way. I could have learned it another way. You’re objectively wrong. And you don’t always have a backup. Especially not back in 1995, when this happened. Back then, backups typically happened nightly. So even with a backup, I would still have lost a day’s worth of work.
I fell for a similar (but less) obvious joke on my first Linux installation back in 1995. That one used dd instead of rm. I lost a lot of code that I had written. After that, I’ve failed to see the humor in this kind of joke. There’s always the risk that someone new doesn’t understand it’s a joke, and tries it out.
I agree. The / directory may receive special considerations, and it may be extra protected, but once I was doing something with rm -r and …/* in some folder inside my home directory… it wasn’t fun.
Some folks have to learn the hard way.
No, I did not have to learn that the hard way. I could have learned it another way. You’re objectively wrong. And you don’t always have a backup. Especially not back in 1995, when this happened. Back then, backups typically happened nightly. So even with a backup, I would still have lost a day’s worth of work.