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On Linux, about twenty-five years back, on stock Red Hat Linux (and, I suspect, all Linux distributions) the
bashshell used to match.*against both.-- the current directory -- and..-- the parent directory.This means that if you ran
rm -rf .*in a directory, you'd delete all the files starting with a "." -- "hidden" files in the current directory. You'd also start recursively-deleting the contents of the parent directory.This led to all kinds of excitement if, in a directory in your home directory, you'd try deleting all dotfiles. The
rmcommand would also attempt to wipe out all of the contents of your home directory -- all of your files. And this isn't a system where there's some "undo delete" option, unless you had a backup system in place (which is a good idea, but wasn't something set up by default).These days,
bashdoesn't do that.EDIT: I'd also add that that was the single major reason that I initially liked
zsh, a competing shell. It didn't do that by default.EDIT2: A possibly-more-applicable-today thing I also learned the hard way: "Make backups. The cost is worth it."