Did happen to me 😂

sudo rm -rf /var

instead of

sudo rm -rf var

It was a long day...

What I learnt from this incident: sudo apt install safe-rm

find / -delete

safe-rm is nice.

What I use on my laptop & desktop, is an alias from rm to "gio trash", which is the default ubuntu-distro-family implementation of the desktop trashcan.

Interestingly, my colleague had formed a folder named "*" by mistake. In order to delete, my colleague typed rm -rf *

It was taking a long time and my colleague kept on wondering why it was taking so much time until I came into the room and stopped it.

Thankfully, we were able to recover the data.

Dont think it kills running processes

If you have ever deleted node_modules from an angular project. Also don’t delete that folder from Windows explorer because it can lock your machine for hours on a complex project.