While it takes significant extra effort, it’s more robust to carefully decompose patterns into exact lists of files that can be reviewed (or use "find"), and th

While it takes significant extra effort, it’s more robust to carefully decompose patterns into exact lists of files that can be reviewed (or use "find"), and this has saved me a couple of times. For example, expand wildcards into a separate list of files that can become controlled commands ("rm -f A/file1", "rm -f A/file2", "rmdir A", ... instead of "rm -Rf ..."). This way, if directory "A" contains anything you didn’t expect, the "rmdir" fails at the end; and, someone can review the list of proposed files to be deleted before you run. Oh, and instead of having that sinking feeling of "rm" taking “too long” to run, your command is merely in the process of constructing a list of 1000 unexpected files instead of blowing away half your disk with shocking efficiency. Also, file lists are pretty useful when you need to make minor edits (e.g. sometimes it’s a lot easier to find and exclude a few files from a list that you don’t want to touch, as opposed to describing those in a wildcard or search). Depending on the task (and assuming no filesystem caching) it can be faster to gather up a list once and pass the composed list in to a whole series of commands. This is also good if you technically want the list to remain frozen even if the filesystem is changing underneath you, e.g. new files being added somewhere in the tree.