I think people who routinely write this kind of commands in an interactive shell are well aware of the shortcomings, they just deal with it when they need to an

I think people who routinely write this kind of commands in an interactive shell are well aware of the shortcomings, they just deal with it when they need to and not before. One example is that people very rarely handle '\n' or spaces in filenames (e.g. using the -0 option from `xargs`). Whatever works is fine as long as one knows the risks. For a one-off thing like the one mentioned in the article I'd say it's almost ok, although I'd put `git checkout --` in the category of risky commands if you don't have any backup.